UPDATE:
As revealed in the comments of the Reddit post with the Riot Games interview. The delay for the second season saddens many. However, they know it’ll be worth it when the episodes finally arrive!
ORIGINAL STORY
We’re very much in the middle of a “golden age” of video game adaptations. You no doubt have heard of the success of the first animated film with Mario and how that’s carving its legacy in just its opening weekend. Then, there are the movies with Sonic, which were both box office smashes and are getting spinoffs. Then, of course, we’d be foolish to forget The Last Of Us, which is already getting awards buzz, and there are more likely on the way given the quality that has been shown so far. But one thing that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is a certain Netflix show for which fans now await a sequel. We speak, of course, of the upcoming Arcane Season 2.
The original season hit Netflix in 2021 and took over the platform. It featured a deeper look at the League of Legends universe and focused on some of its most beloved characters like Jinx and Vi. The animation style, voice acting, and how they interpreted things made it feel much more than we’ve seen in the games.
The first season won many awards, and people have been begging for Arcane Season 2 ever since. Riot Games and their animation studio partners promised that Season 2 was in the works, but things have been quiet since then, making fans nervous.
Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent talked about the second season in an interview that was posted on Reddit. He even admitted that he had seen the second season’s third episode and was happy with where things were going. But he also admitted that 2023 wasn’t going to be the year it released:
“It is not ready yet and there [are] two reasons for that,” Laurent noted in the chat. “One, you want the quality. We just don’t want to rush and so that takes time. So that’s the good reason. The bad reason is, honestly, we didn’t know if Season 1 was going to be a success so we didn’t start Season 2 until [later]. If I had known, we could have started Season 2 way earlier. But we didn’t know so we waited a bit and now we’re paying the price. So, unfortunately, it’s not going to be this year.”
That might sound depressing, but it was fair that they didn’t go straight into Season 2 because the first season could’ve been a bust on Netflix, and then they would’ve been in the hole.
That could mean that Season 3 gets greenlit quicker, and things will be faster during that waiting period.
