'Westworld' bosses say they're already crafting Season 2, hint at other worlds

NEW YORK -- HBO hasn't officially renewed Westworld for Season 2 yet, but showrunner Jonathan Nolan says they're already planning the story for the show's inevitable pickup.

During the show's panel at New York Comic Con, Nolan admitted that one of the toughest parts of the season was figuring out what to cut from each episode, since they ended up with so much interesting material thanks to the actors' performances.

"There were a handful of things that we weren’t able to touch in the first season; we’re now currently breaking the second season," he told fans. "One of the really nice things about TV is, you get to go again."

In Michael Crichton's 1973 film, Westworld wasn't the only theme park that guests could visit to live out their role-playing fantasies -- Delos, the company behind the Western-themed vacation spot, also operated "Roman World" and "Medieval World." A 1976 sequel that wasn't penned by Crichton took place in a park known as "Futureworld."

Nolan and his co-showrunner Lisa Joy were cagey about the possibility of other theme parks in their iteration of Westworld, but did offer one hint: When a fan asked if Roman World or Medieval World existed in their universe, Nolan initially dodged the question, before answering, "You said Roman World and Medieval World, right? No."

That seems to imply that they might have plans for their own worlds beyond what Crichton introduced in the original film.

Joy later offered an explanation for why she and Nolan are so secretive, both when it comes to teasing fans in the real world and in parsing out information within the show.

"You let the content dictate the structure, so in starting with the point of view of the hosts, and in limiting our view and our unveiling of the world from that aperture -- which is also why we aren’t talking about whether there are external worlds, because you want to find them rooted from the hosts’ POV -- so you learn the rules of the world through them," Joy said. "It allows us to live with questions without being too expository up front. Sometimes that’s frustrating because you wanna know ‘how does everything work, tell me now!’ But the hosts don’t have that luxury and so neither does our audience."

Westworld airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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