The final season of ‘Game of Thrones’ airing in 2018 will finish with six episodes…
Winter has arrived and the end is near.
‘Game of Thrones’ will officially come to an end with an eighth and final season that will come to a conclusion with a total of six episodes.
‘Game of Thrones’ show runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss officially announced the news on Sunday.
“It’s only going to be six episodes for the final season,” Benioff said at the South by Southwest Film Festival.
“From the beginning we’ve wanted to tell a 70-hour movie. It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it’s stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle and now we’re coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way, I’m very happy we’ve kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to.”
It’s been long rumored that the final two seasons of ‘Game of Thrones’ would total out at 13 episodes, but of course fans and HBO executives have been holding out hope that the show might go on a little longer.
As it turns out, Benioff and Weiss have plotted a course for the final two seasons, which will bring ‘Game of Thrones’ to a close once and for all. The sixth and penultimate season of ‘Game of Thrones’ is set to bow on Sunday night, July 16 with seven episodes airing on HBO.
The eighth and final season will go into production later this year with a 2018 debut date as the most popular series in HBO history comes to an end.
With ‘Game of Thrones’ coming to its conclusion next year there have been a ton of rumors about a potential prequel series on HBO that would potentially tell some of the back stories behind the source material in George R.R. Martin’s sprawling epic, “A Song of Ice and Fire”. While that idea still lives on, Benioff and Weiss confirmed they will not be a part of it.
“I think HBO might well do [another series] and I look forward to watching it and I think it be great, but I think they should get new blood in,” Benioff said.
Given the tremendous success in ‘Game of Thrones’ and the interest in another series, it’s hard to imagine HBO won’t at least pitch the idea to a few candidates to see who could bring it to life on television.
First things first, however, ‘Game of Thrones’ still has two more seasons to go kicking off with season seven on July 16 on HBO.
