How Many Episodes Is HBO's The Last of Us?

The Last of Us is finally airing on HBO, but how many weeks will it be around for? The Last of Us is one of the most beloved video games of all time, helping cement PlayStation as a platform for prestige, story-driven, cinematic games. The game's immediate critical and commercial success warranted Hollywood scrambling to get an adaptation off of the ground. Sam Raimi was intended to helm a movie about the game, but it fell apart over time. HBO eventually got the rights and was off to the races, even retaining key creative talents like series creator Neil Druckmann as a writer/director/producer on the show.

After a long road, The Last of Us began airing last Sunday and will be for the next 8 weeks. The show will have 9 episodes total, but was intended to have 10. The first two episodes were combined together into a single episode to help get the bulk of the introduction to characters, motivations, and themes out of the way. The first episode was intended to end shortly after we are introduced to Joel in the QZ, but HBO pushed to combine the first two episodes together so viewers could meet Ellie and also not be too put off by the amount of children dying. So, for the next 8 weeks, The Last of Us will spend roughly an hour a week tackling key parts of the game until it arrives at the conclusion of that story. The showrunners also have plans to adapt the second game if a second season is greenlit, but it remains to be seen how that will be done.

The second game is far more dense and has a lot going on. It likely wouldn't be easy to adapt that game into another 9 or 10 episodes like the first game. However, that's a bridge that will have to be crossed at a later date. Either way, you can expect to watch The Last of Us until March 2023.

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