In an interview posted to Bilibili, Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent confirmed that Arcane Season 2 won’t be coming in 2023. However, he revealed that he’s already seen Episode 3 of the second season and that production of the show is well underway.
Arcane is one of the many recent video game adaptations that’s proven that stories rooted in the world of video games can, in fact, be turned into high-quality productions. Arcane’s first season swept almost every award show it was nominated for and drummed up a ton of hype, even for people who weren’t already invested in the League of Legends universe.
It should come as no surprise that people are anxiously awaiting news on season 2’s release date. It’s already been confirmed to be in production, but there hasn’t been much news on when it’s coming.
In a recent interview with longtime LPL caster Guan Ze Yuan, Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent confirmed that Arcane season 2 won’t be coming in 2023 and gave some details as to why it’s taking so long for them to release a follow-up.
Riot CEO reveals that Arcane’s success was a surprise internally
With the way season 1 ended, it was clear that season 2 was, at the very least, planned by the writers. It was confirmed shortly after the first season’s release that we’d be getting a continuation of the story. Fans let out a sigh of relief knowing we’d get a continuation of the story.
That said, whether or not season 2 got produced at all depended largely on how the first season performed. While we now know it was a smash hit, those who worked on the show weren’t expecting it to have as much reach as it did.
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Laurent spoke about the fact that, if they’d known the show was going to be so successful, they could have started production much earlier.
The segment of Guan Ze Yuan’s interview that spoke about Arcane was reposted to Reddit, starting a conversation about the show and bringing the interview to international audiences.
The way Laurent started his answer was certainly surprising. “I just watched the third episode of season 2 before my flight, so we’re making progress on it. It is not ready yet and there’s two reasons for that. One, we want quality. We just don’t want to rush.”
Laurent continued, giving the second reason. “Honestly, we didn’t know if season 1 was gonna be a success. […] If I had known, we could have started season 2 way earlier. But we didn’t know, so we kind of waited a bit. Now we’re paying the price. So, it’s unfortunately not going to be this year.”
