‘White Lotus,’ ‘Last of Us,’ and More HBO Shows Delayed Due to Hollywood Strikes

If you thought waiting week to week for new episodes of The White Lotus was hard work, you’re going to need a long vacation. The beloved HBO anthology series “likely” won’t return with its third season until 2025, according to HBO exec Casey Bloys via Deadline. The network is also “likely” delaying the release of Welcome to Derry, a Stephen King–inspired spinoff of the horror movie It. The good news is that, hopefully, the show’s writers and actors will get a fairer deal for their work since the production delays are a result of the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes.

Bloys made the announcements on Thursday at a New York press conference where he also apologized for trolling TV critics following a Rolling Stone exposé.

Details on the third season of White Lotus remain scant, other than it will be set in Thailand. Any returning cast (like how Jennifer Coolidge reprised her role for Season Two) has yet to be announced. Welcome to Derry comes from the creative team that made the two recent It movies and will star Madeleine Stowe, Stephen Rider, Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, and James Remar, according to Deadline.

Viewers will also have to wait patiently for a second season of The Last of Us. Bloys said that production will begin early next year, and Variety speculates that it probably won’t air until 2025.

That said, the prospects for the season are in decent shape. “We were able to map out all of Season 2,” showrunner Craig Mazin told Entertainment Weekly in August. “And I also wrote and submitted the script for the first episode and sent it in [to HBO] around 10:30 or 10:40 PM right before the midnight the [WGA] strike began. I think it’s becoming essentially a near certainty that we won’t be able to start [filming] when we were hoping to start, which is upsetting. We are all raring to go.”

One silver lining for HBO Maxinistas is that the second season of House of the Dragon will arrive in “early summer,” according to Bloys and Variety. Reporters at the press conference even got to see a trailer for the season, though they were forbidden to write about it until an agreed-upon date, or surely a dragon would breathe fire all over their notebooks and laptops, and they would probably be cleaning up the mess until the date they could write about it anyway.

Bloys hopes another Game of Thrones spinoff, A Night of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, could begin shooting in the spring if the SAG-AFTRA strike reaches an amicable resolution.

From Rolling Stone US.