Now that Prime Video’s Fallout series has been deemed a success, the series has been renewed for a second season. Confirmation of a second season was announced on April 18, 2024, a little more than a week since the series debuted.
And thank goodness too, as the first season ends on a cliffhanger. While it is a satisfying ending, there are some loose ends that we need answers to. Hopefully, these answers will come in the second season. But how long will we have to wait?
With Fallout Season 2 confirmed, when will the new season be released?
Fallout series executive producer Jonathan Nolan admitted that he finds long gaps in between seasons frustrating. And I think we can all agree with him on that. But he also acknowledged that these sorts of blockbuster shows take time. To that end, he’s hopeful we won’t have to wait too long for a second season, but it’s also not entirely in his control.
No, I find that gap frustrating, as well. Part of it is just the ambition of these shows, right? From shows like Game of Thrones and then Westworld, onwards, that practical photography means it takes time. But I am as frustrated as anyone that it takes this long to get these shows on the air. So, we are poised and hopeful that we’re not gonna have to wait quite that long, should we be so lucky.
It took two years between the start of filming for Season 1 in July 2022 and the series’ premiere in April 2024. If the pre-production process done and filming begins quickly enough, there’s a slim chance that Season 2 could arrive by the end of 2025.
But in all likelihood, we’re looking at a 2026 release for Fallout Season 2 at the earliest, and possibly even a 2027 premiere. I hope we’re not waiting three year for it though.
The good news is that many of the initial challenges with bringing Fallout to life on the small screen were addressed with the first season. The goal with Season 2, according to Nolan, is building on the foundation that is now laid.
Speaking to Collider, he continued:
I think the challenges for us with Fallout were the scope of the environments, and figuring out how to make that work. Also, the creature creation; the practical and vis effects-based creature creation, which was not entirely new to us, but more than I had done before. And by the end of the first season, we had figured out an awful lot of the tools that we use to make this universe. So, you do get some economies of scale going into it, but then in any second chapter, you’d want to make it that much more ambitious. So, you have a lot of stuff that you start with, and this was part of it for us with Westworld was wanting to constantly one-up ourselves every season. We were like, “Okay, we built the park. Now, how do we build the outside world?” And the challenges of that, directorially, was so much of the fun of that, and of this. You want to keep topping yourself.
How many seasons are planned for Fallout?
There’s no set number of seasons for the Fallout series, and it seems like Amazon is fine with greenlighting them one at a time. As of right now, Amazon only confirmed a second season. And Nolan, similarly, is approaching the series one season at a time.
When we talk about it, it’s really more of a question for Graham and Geneva, and how excited they are. I think with television, one of the beauties of it is if the audience comes out for it, if people are excited to see it, there’s an invitation to keep going. But I think one of the lessons that I learned very early on in filmmaking, again, on those Batman movies, was it’s nice if you get a chance to go again, but you’ve got to put everything you can into the season that’s in front of you.
Season 1 of the Fallout TV series is now streaming exclusively on Prime Video. The official synopsis reads:
Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. Two-hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.
Ella Purnell is Lucy, an optimistic Vault-dweller with an all-American can-do spirit. Her peaceful and idealistic nature is tested when she is forced to the surface to rescue her father. Aaron Moten is Maximus, a young soldier who rises to the rank of squire in the militaristic faction called the Brotherhood of Steel. He will do anything to further the Brotherhood’s goals of bringing law and order to the wasteland. Walton Goggins is the Ghoul, a morally ambiguous bounty hunter who holds within him a 200-year history of the post-nuclear world. These disparate parties collide when chasing an artifact from an enigmatic researcher that has the potential to radically change the power dynamic in this world.