Lionsgate Play has confirmed that they have picked up the second season of the much-talked-about sports/gay romance series "Heated Rivalry", which will premiere in 2027. The platform also hosted the first season for Indian subscribers.
Creator Jacob Tierney recently told Deadline that the second chapter of its lead characters, hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, would be relatively more "serious" with "raised stakes," unlike the first season. It would be set a decade after the events of the first season.
While the first season was based on the first two books in author Rachel Reid's 'Game Changers' series, the second season will derive its material from the sixth book, ‘The Long Game', which sees the couple still keeping their relationship secret despite Ilya's insistence on making it public.
“It really is different, and the challenge, from an adaptation standpoint, is you’re in much more serious territory,” Tierney recently said at BookCon 2026, as quoted by Entertainment Weekly. “There’s still lots of flirting, and there’s lots of sex, but it’s this kind of danger. This kind of ‘hotel room, adolescent sex’ stuff is largely gone.”
Further teasing the details of the upcoming events, Tierney added, “What do you do after the rush of danger is gone and yet now you have to live in a relationship where you still aren’t communicating properly, much as you would like to?. You can say you love each other, but as adults know, there’s so much more than that to make a relationship successful. And that is what they’re learning.”
The series has been noted for its strikingly uncompromising approach when it comes to sexuality, an approach that fans have warmly embraced. Unlike many other queer dramas, "Heated Rivalry" is explicitly sexual from the start. Critics and creators have explained that the sex scenes are central to the characters' emotional development, turning the "violent aggression" of hockey into something intimate and "neutralised".
"Heated Rivalry" officially premiered on Crave in Canada on November 28, 2025, with a simultaneous release on HBO Max in the United States and Australia.
