The second season of the HBO and Sony Pictures TV drama “The Last of Us” will launch in April, Sony confirmed Monday during the electronics giant’s presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
During the hourlong press session, Sony officials also disclosed that Columbia Pictures and Sony PlayStation are working on a movie adaptation of the video game “Horizon Zero Dawn.” That title had been in development as a series for Netflix. No other details about the movie project were revealed other than that the two Sony units are collaborating on a film adaptation, according to PlayStation Productions chief Asad Qizilbash.
The timing of the return of “Last of Us” was confirmed by Neil Druckmann, studio head and head of creative for Naughty Dog, which created the video game on which the HBO drama is based. Druckmann also cued up a short teaser for Season 2 for the audience that gave fans a brief glimpse of Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie Williams, among other key characters.
An intense one-minute teaser was released Monday on the Max YouTube channel, showing flashes of what to expect in the new season. Notably, the teaser re-states the month of April as the Season 2 release date without naming a specific date.
In the teaser, we get a first look at Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, a character that’s new to the show but played a key role in “The Last of Us” game series. “It doesn’t matter if you have a code like me,” she says after we see her stalking down a dark hallway, pistol in hand. “There are just some things everyone agrees are just wrong.”
The official logline for Season 2 reads: “Five years after the events of the first season, Joel and Ellie are drawn into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.”
It was also announced that Arrowhead Games’ third-person shoot’em up “Helldivers” is being developed into a feature film. The original “Helldivers” was a cult favorite among co-op gamers, but the franchise exploded to global popularity when its follow-up “Helldivers 2” was released in 2024. The sequel is one of the fastest-selling PlayStation games of all time, selling 12 million copies in its first 12 weeks on the market.