Arcane creators admit the show was never meant to run for 5 seasons, it was a joke that got out of hand: 'Nothing but tomfoolery'

Jinx, wearing a hood, stares down with abject malice at the camera in Arcane Season 2. — (Image credit: Netflix)

The second and final season of Arcane, the wildly popular animated League of Legends spinoff, recently launched on Netflix—and straight into rumours and scuttlebutt that, in fact, the show was once intended to have five seasons. The show's creators have now explained that, while this isn't the case, the idea came out of an in-joke that some took too seriously.

The rumour began with a Variety report last week on Riot's wider entertainment aims, which claimed that Arcane "initially budgeted for a five-season arc." This has now been addressed by co-creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee, speaking to TechRadar, who say it was a misinterpreted joke made by former Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent years ago.

But the notion it ever would last that long comes from a wind-up. "What happened was I think we had the pilot or a few episodes, but we still hadn't had the green light for a full season," said Linke. "At the time, Nicolo thought it would be really funny to pull me into a room and say 'Hey, I know you haven't had the green light yet, and I decided I'm not going to give it to you'. I sat there, looking pretty upset, before he added 'Because I'm giving you the go-ahead for five seasons!'"

Linke says they had a laugh about it, even if he was a little discombobulated. "[The five season rumour is] almost the opposite of what people have interpreted it to be," adds Yee. "Making an animated series, it has such a long development pipeline that it was a lot for us to ask [Riot] to trust us with one season. But we also said 'If you want there to be another season soon after that, we need to start working on it while we're finishing the first one'. So, that five-season joke was their way of saying 'Hey, we want to give you a lot of runway with this.'"

Linke also helpfully muddies the waters ever-so-slightly: "Yeah, then we said 'okay, it's going to be two, and then we'll grow from there.'" Erm… so there might be more to come? Yee says "I think we imagined ways that it could go beyond that, but one more season was the milestone we always wanted to hit." Hmmm.

Arcane has been a big success for Riot, but at some expense: The two seasons cost a whopping $250 million, which seems astonishing for a cartoon. Season two seems to have gone down well with fans though, and Riot's chief product officer Marc Merrill says "we’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time." The first three episodes of season two are out now, with another three landing November 16, and the series' concluding episodes releasing November 23.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."