Shadow and Bone Season 2 release date and how many episodes latest

Netflix has now confirmed that Shadow and Bone Season 2 is in production, which means its time to look ahead at the latest on the release date for the second part of the series. It will follow up on an incredibly successful debut, which came out in April 2021, and leads to the prospect of many more stories from the Grishaverse to arrive on the streaming platform.

The story is an adaptation of Leigh Barduga’s books, The Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows Duology. It will pick up with Alina in the aftermath of the expansion of the fold by Kirigan in the final episode of Season 1. The Darkling was able to survive the Volcra attack, which saw him being carried away into the Fold, and it looks like he’ll be on the tail of Alina and Mal.

The heroes were last seen on a boat away from Ravka in a bid to find new allies and to give Alina more time to develop her powers in order to tear down the Fold. This will be the focus of Season 2, picking up with all of the characters for the next part of the adventure, but with the Darkling’s new ability to take Fold wraiths with him, it’s going to be a dangerous road to cross.

Cast

The cast for Shadow and Bone Season 2 will see the return of both Jessie Mei Li (Last Night in Soho) as Alina Starkov and Ben Barnes (The Punisher) as General Kurigan, AKA The Darkling. Archie Renaux (Morbius) stars as Mal, along with Freddy Carter as Kaz Brekker, Amita Suman (Doctor Who) as Inej, Kit Young as Jesper, Danielle Galligan as Nina and Calahan Scogman as Matthias.

We’ll update you on more details for the cast of Season 2 as they’re confirmed.

Shadow and Bone Season 2 release date

Shadow and Bone was one of the surprise hits of 2021 and it didn’t take too long after its release for Netflix to confirm that it would be making a sequel, but with the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic details were slim in terms of production dates. However, with the recent announcement that the show was underway, it gives us a bit more to go on in terms of when the release date is likely to be.

For the first season, production was around eighteen months in total, but we’re not expecting Season 2 to take quite as long. There should be less possible interruptions from the pandemic in 2022, especially from late spring onwards, and if we assume the production has more infrastructure and processes in place from the first series we should be looking at a worse case scenario of 12-14 months.

That would give us a long-view release date around April 2023, which would be a similar time of year as the opening season. It would also put in a perfect place for Easter, which is one of the biggest TV binging periods of the year, adding to the likelihood of it being a good target.

The counterpoint to this is that the success of the show might mean a much speedier production and intent from Netflix to feature the show to compete with the likes of Disney+. The rival normally goes big over Christmas with the likes of Hawkeye and The Book of Boba Fett being huge in winter 2021/22, so Netflix might try to do something similar.

If that’s the case then it could well be one of its big shows for Christmas later this year. The Witcher was its own big-hitter over the holidays, which was no small deal in comparison either, but it probably missed out on some of the gravitas and build-up with all episodes arriving at once instead of the weekly releases that we see on Disney+.

While Shadow and Bone did well, it wasn’t as much of a smash hit as the likes of The Witcher and with other bigger name sequels on the cards like Squid Game and Bridgerton, the Christmas spot might be locked out. An alternative is that it gets a slot in late Autumn 2022 as a build-up show to the bigger releases over the holidays. We already know that Stranger Things Season 4 is planned for summer this year, so that leaves autumn free if the production can wrap things up quickly enough.

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How many episodes in Season 2

Season 1 of Shadow and Bone had a total of eight episodes, so the second season should be close to that in the very least. If you look at its other big Netflix shows like Stranger Things it has eight to nine episodes per series, so it makes sense for the fantasy series to follow suit with a similar number of episodes in Season 2.

Runtime

Episode runtime is was on average 45 to 58 minutes long and again that should be the same in the second season of the show.

We’ll update things here as more details are confirmed about the release date, episodes and runtime. You can also check out our TV news section to see other big releases, or visit the Netflix website to see more on the show at https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80236319.