Bad news, Arcane fans — the wait for Season 2 is going to last a little longer
The second season of Riot Games’ wildly popular animated series, based on its League of Legends franchise, will not release in 2023. The news comes from Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent, who spoke about the show’s long production on a recent episode of LoL Pro League caster Guan Ze Yuan’s podcast.
As spotted by The Gamer, a write-in question from a fan that directly asked “Where is Arcane part 2?” prompted Laurent to state that Season 2 will not release before 2024. He then attempted to explain the reason behind the show’s unusually long production timeline.
“I just watched the third episode of Season 2 before my flight, so we’re making progress on it,” Laurent remarked. “It is not ready yet, and there’s two reasons for that. One, you want the quality. We just don’t want to rush. That takes time. So that’s the good reason. The bad reason is, honestly, we didn’t know if Season 1 was gonna be a success, so we didn’t start Season 2 until after.
“If I had known we could have started season two way earlier, but we didn’t know, so we kind of waited a bit, and so now we’re paying the price. So, unfortunately, not gonna be this year.”
It makes sense that Riot would want to err on the side of caution with an unproven new show attempting to adapt a dense video game IP for television. However, it also spent a truckload of money on marketing the show ahead of its release to help shore up a strong debut. It worked — the show met with rave reviews, winning Best Adaptation at The Game Awards and the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. It achieved what, at that time, felt like a rare feat — strictly faithful to its source material while remaining accessible to new audiences that knew nothing about League.
You can catch all of Season 1 of Arcane on Netflix as you while away the long months waiting for Season 2.
Leave a Reply