Why did Arcane not get a 3rd Season? Answer finally revealed

Arcane's two-season run might have been the most hope that the gaming community has gotten when it comes to the adaptation of video games to the screen. The Emmy-winning show first premiered in 2021, and it has been a ride ever since then. However, owing to the COVID-19 struggles, there was a lot of gap between the two seasons, the second of which premiered in 2024.

Showrunner Christian Linke, in a recent conversation with Deadline, revealed that Arcane was created around answering some major questions, and their job was finished once they really dived deep and answered those questions.

Here is everything we know about the decision not to pick Arcane up for a third season.

Showrunner reveals why Arcane did not receive a revival for a third season

It came as a shock to most when Arcane decided to end its critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning run in just two seasons. After the three-year gap between the two seasons, owing to COVID-19, fans were hoping they would get to see more of Vi and Jinx and Viktor and Jayce, and that too, without a three-year gap.

However, in a recent conversation with Deadline, showrunner Christian Linke talks about the inspiration behind the game and the questions they wanted to answer in the show, thereby explaining why the two-season run was just what the show needed.

Linte explains that there were a lot of character arcs set up in the first season when they were just testing out the first season to see if the audience actually liked it. These character arcs and questions regarding the two duos, Viktor and Jayce and Jinx and Vi, were at the heart of Arcane and needed to be answered.

"I think a lot of the character arcs that we set up, we felt like we needed to see the end of them. It’s really about the relationships between characters. You have the brotherhood between Viktor and Jayce and you have the sisterhood between Vi and Jinx. That’s really at the heart of it. There’s a lot of stories that are happening with different characters, but really at the heart, those were the most important ones."

"The question since the very beginning was can Vi and Jinx ever be sisters again? For Jayce and Viktor, the question really was what happens when you lose sight of your dream and you get seduced by power and other people and what they’re trying to turn your dream into, and can you find your way back to that core dream? I think on the larger scale of the story, those were the ones we really had to dive into and answer."

Linke also revealed their inspiration behind picking the sisters and Jace and Viktor up to tell their story through Arcane:

"Primarily, it starts with the gut feeling of Jinx and Vi are just fu**ing cool. They were just cool, there was attitude and they also weren’t the typical fantasy video game characters. There was just something else about them and I think they just added really interesting questions. As players, we played these characters for many years and always wondered what happened between them as sisters. That’s a great story to explore."

Talking about Viktor and Jayce in Arcane, he revealed:

"For Jayce and Viktor, there was always this question of what if these two people work together on this technology and they come from these different angles. One from a bit more utopian, like reach for the skies, which is Jayce. Like a brighter, better tomorrow. And Viktor is much more grounded around the fact that there are people like me who have broken bodies, broken souls, and we can fix them. It’s a different approach and when the technology becomes reality, you’re going to go in different ways."

"So, I think there was just always these differences that felt like it was a great promise for a story and that’s just what inspired us trying to explore it."

So, once the show answered the questions it set out to explore and took the deepest dives into these characters while staying truthful to the source, there wasn't anything else left to do. These characters might make a comeback in other stories that the studio chooses to adapt; however, this is the end for Arcane.

Arcane continues to be one of the top adaptations of a popular video game, so much so that the way it managed to fix plot holes in the Riot Games storytelling convinced them to declare the adaptation canon in the lore, a first for any adaptation.

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