As season 4 for Game of Thrones rapidly approaches, the show runners have revealed what will likely be a 7 season run for the popular HBO series…
If you’re gearing up for season 4 of Game of Thrones like we are then you should know ahead of time that this will likely be the midway point for the entire series run.
According to show runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the plan is for Game of Thrones to conclude after season 7 so they can wrap up their stories in a neat and tidy a way as possible.
“It feels like this is the midpoint for us,” Benioff said in an interview with EW.com. “If we’re going to go seven seasons, which is the plan, season 4 is right down the middle, the pivot point.”
Both Benioff and Weiss expressed in a separate interview with Vanity Fair that seven or eight seasons was the likely course of action regardless of teh show’s popularity. It would be easy to drag out the show for multiple seasons just to get ratings, but the goal for Game of Thrones is to tell the story as it needs to be told and then end the series.
“We know there’s an end somewhere in the seven- or eight-season zone,” Weiss said. “It’s not something that goes ten, eleven — it doesn’t just keep on going because it can. I think the desire to milk more out of it is what would eventually kill it, if we gave in to that.”
Because Game of Thrones is based on the popular book series ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ by George R.R. Martin, the show is running dangerously close to catching up to the source material from the author. The sixth book in the series — The Winds of Winter — isn’t expected to drop until 2015 and that means there’s still one more book — A Dream of Spring — to be released before Martin’s series comes to an end. The last book — A Dance with Dragons — was released in 2011 so if there is another three or four year gap between books, there’s no doubt Game of Thrones will probably catchup or pass the original material before too much longer.
Game of Thrones season 4 is expected to finish up Martin’s third book in the series, A Storm of Swords, and also dip into the fourth book A Feast for Crows. That means by season 5 in 2015, Game of Thrones will already be bearing down on Martin’s original work.
Luckily, both Benioff and Weiss traveled to Martin’s home in New Mexico to spend a week with the author fleshing out the paths for each and every character in the series along with the ultimate end for the show. Now, just in case Game of Thrones starts to catch up to the books, the show will still follow the intended trajectory Martin originally intended even if he hasn’t finished writing the final novel.
“Well, it’s a little complicated, because we have the five books, but then we don’t have anything beyond that, because he’s still working,” Benioff explained to Vanity Fair. “It’s sort of an unusual position in terms of adaptation because, you know, we’re catching up. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. And we’ve talked to George. The lucky part is that George works with us and he’s a producer on the show. Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up, and where exactly that would be. As you were saying before, if you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we sat just down with him and literally went through every character and said, “So what’s the destination for Daenarys? And Arya?”
Both Benioff and Weiss agreed that it’s very conceivable they will pass Martin’s books before the show ends. Given the schedule they are on currently, it’s probably more likely than not that the end of Game of Thrones will land on TV long before Martin’s 7th and final novel hits book stores.
For now the focus remains on Game of Thrones season 4, which launches on HBO on April 6 at 9pm ET/PT.
