While season one of The Last of Us took audiences on a whirlwind, cross-country tour of the United States, very little of what you saw was actually the United States. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann filmed most of season one in the Alberta region of Canada, in and around Calgary, Edmonton, and more. That filming location is changing for season two, but not by much.
Deadline reports that Joel and Ellie are heading west as The Last of Us will be filming in and around Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s a location used by many, many shows and movies because of the country’s tax breaks and abundant production industry. So that’s not really much of a surprise.
What does make it interesting is that a good chunk of The Last of Us Part II, the video game this second season of the show will begin to adapt, takes place in Seattle, Washington, which is only a three-hour drive from Vancouver. Could the production have moved further west to more accurately capture that Pacific Northwest vibe? That seems like a reasonable assumption.
There’s no word on when filming for season two will begin but chances are the season will only tell half the story of the second game. “I think that the amount of story that remains that we have not covered would be more than a season of television,” Mazin told Gizmodo last year. “So assuming we can keep going forward, the idea would be to do more than just one more season. But this isn’t the kind of show that is going to be seven seasons.”
Without spoiling anything (you can play the game, read our review, or watch a playthrough to do that), The Last of Us Part II picks up some time after the events of the first game/series and deals directly with the fallout of Joel’s actions at the end. Who did he kill? What is the fallout? And what will Ellie think when she realises what he did? All that comes into play.
With the Vancouver production still off on the horizon, fans should probably plan on seeing The Last of Us season two in late 2024 or maybe even early 2025.