HBO’s The Last of Us might be winning entirely deserved plaudits for being one of the finest video game adaptations we’re ever likely to see, but it isn’t the genre’s best-reviewed project. While a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is close to impeccable, Netflix’s Arcane is the one that rules the roost with a perfect 100 percent approval rating from critics.
The audience average may be slightly lower, but a 96 percent tally is hardly something to be sniffed at, never mind the fact it’s more than enough to cement the League of Legends-inspired animated series as the single top-rated console-to-screen translation on the entire aggregation site. That’s a hell of an achievement for a genre that’s still trying to find some sort of sustained consistency, but fans could be waiting a while for the next batch of episodes.
Despite its reputation for canning popular fantasy shows with reckless abandon, Netflix confirmed back in November of 2021 that the show had landed a renewal. 17 months later and we’re no closer to finding out when Arcane will be back on our screens, but Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent offered a devastating update, per WIN.
“I just watched the third episode of season 2, before my flight to China. We’re making progress on it. It’s not ready yet. There are two reasons for that, you want the quality, we just don’t want to rush, and so that takes time, and that’s a good reason. The bad reason is that, honestly, we didn’t know if season 1 was going to be a success. So we didn’t start season 2 until after. We didn’t know. And so if I’d known, we could have started season 2 way earlier, but we didn’t know so we kind of waited a bit and so now we’re paying the price.”
From the sound of things, then, it’s looking like Arcane won’t be dropping its sophomore set of episodic adventures until 2024 at the earliest, which is devastating news for anyone who was hoping it wouldn’t suffer from the agonizing multi-year gap that’s become such an infuriating recurring trend on streaming.
