If you have any vague interest in the entertainment industry, then you'll no doubt be aware of the ongoing Writer's Guild of America strikes. Writers across the industry have taken to the streets to campaign for better working conditions and improved pay, and it's caused several big name movies and TV shows to halt production entirely. Of course, no writers means no scripts, and many productions are currently on hold until the WGA has their demands met.
Well, we can now add The Last of Us Season 2 to the pile of projects currently in limbo, as it's been confirmed by Variety that production is currently on hold. Variety also claims that casting for roles in Season 2 was underway until earlier this week, and that the casting team was allegedly asking actors to read lines from The Last of Us Part 2 before giving it up as a lost cause.
Fans of the first season will be aware that Craig Mazin wrote the bulk of the show, while Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann wrote a few episodes. Mazin himself is currently on the picket lines with his fellow writers, while it's also been confirmed that Druckmann isn't working on the series at the moment either. With no writers, the casting team at HBO have no scripts for actors to read, which means progress has ground to a halt. However, the hope is that filming will still begin in Early 2024 in Vancouver.
It's not very clear when the WGA strike will end, though you'd hope big streaming services like Netflix will meet their demands sooner rather than later. The WGA is currently asking for streaming shows to have teams of six to twelve writers each, and that those writers be given a minimum number of guaranteed employment weeks to work across the year, ranging between 10 and 52. They're not exactly unreasonable demands, but all we can do is wait and see whether these terms will be accepted or not.
You'd expect HBO to at the very least, especially considering how much of a roaring success the first season of The Last of Us has been for the service. Warner Bros. recently boasted during a quarterly earnings report that HBO's The Last of Us is currently averaging around 32 million viewers per episode, making it the highest viewed show on HBO Max across the entirety of Europe and Latin America. Now if Warner Bros. and HBO would just go ahead and share that success with the people that actually made the show they keep bragging about, that'd be grand.