Euphoria Won’t Drop Out of the Race Either

HBO has announced an official start date for filming Euphoria.

How many headlines have you seen about Euphoria’s third season in the past year? Here’s a new one: It will (allegedly) start filming in January 2025, and you can take that or leave it.

The beleaguered third season of the show has been the subject of many headlines, few of them believable, since February 2022, when it was renewed amid its second season. Based on a handful of interviews, it seems like filming was supposed to start sometime in 2023 but got pushed back by the writers’ strike and Levinson’s commitment to his patently bad HBO show with the Weeknd, The Idol. In the meantime, all kinds of rumors swirled — that Billie Eilish had joined the cast, that they were filming at the Vatican, that the next season would be set five years in the future (which would at least avoid making actors who are well into their late 20s play teenagers). Whether any of them were true remains to be seen, because, well, nothing has been filmed yet.

Though HBO has repeatedly said it plans to premiere the show in 2025, production has yet to begin. Deadline reported in March that Levinson was still working on scripts and filming had been put on hold indefinitely, with the cast told to “pursue other opportunities.” In the meantime, HBO has confidently insisted that everything is totally fine and cool. In June, HBO CEO Casey Bloys confirmed that the show will have “the same core cast” — which news outlets have interpreted to mean Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, and Hunter Schafer. It will presumably not include the late Angus Cloud or Barbie Ferreira, who announced her departure in August 2022 — and will not take place in high school.

And now, HBO has officially announced that season three will be filming in January 2025. In an optimistic statement, HBO exec Francesca Orsi said she was “thrilled that we are ready to begin production” and that the cast and crew “look forward to bringing this new season of Euphoria to life for the fans.” We’ll see about that!

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