The final season of Game of Thrones may be far, far ahead, according to new reports.
Season seven, the show's penultimate, was already pushed back several months due to a production schedule that required scenes involving winter. Game of Thrones season seven begins airing July 16.
But it might take a tad bit longer before Season eight airs. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, HBO's programming chief Casey Bloys hinted that the show's eighth season might not debut until 2019.
Game Of Thrones Season 8 May Be Delayed
"By the time the final season airs, Dan and David will have been at this for 12 years," said Bloys. "They didn't go and do movies in between seasons, they didn't set anything else up, they put everything — and are putting everything — into this show."
"Yeah. They have to write the episodes and figure out the production schedule. We'll have a better sense of that once they get further into the writing," Bloys replied when the interviewer ask if the final season could air sometime in 2018 or 2019.
Based solely on Bloy's words, it seems a longer-than-usual delay should be expected between Season seven and Season eight, but that's still not official. Anyhow, his comments imply that HBO is not rushing showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss to produce the final season. All great art takes time before completion, of course.
Why The Delay Could Be A Good Thing
It's possible, however, that the delay is actually a good thing, since it might give HBO more time to determine the future of the series, including how many spinoffs it plans to create after Game of Thrones wraps up.
A number of reports suggest the network is developing four Game of Thrones spinoffs in total.
"I haven't even seen outlines. In the press at large, everybody said, 'there are four spinoffs' and they assume that means each one is happening and we're going to have a new Game of Thrones show per quarter," said Bloys.
Game Of Thrones Spinoff Plans
Although Game of Thrones is in itself a stellar achievement in storytelling, world-building, production design, visual effects; and although the more reasonable fans of the show might find eight seasons sufficient enough to tell a compelling narrative — Westeros is complex enough to warrant further exploration, and doing otherwise would prove to be an embarrassment of riches.
"The fact that there's enough material to even contemplate making different prequels is crazy when you think about it," said Bloys.
The fact that HBO isn't concerned with speed already tells a lot about its commitment to ensure the show's quality. It wants the final season, and by extension, the spinoffs, to live up to the bar set by Benioff and Weiss.
"It's such a special show. I want to make sure that [any prequel] feels worthy," said Bloys.
But of course, there are bigger questions here than the supposed delay, one of them being George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series, from which the series is based. Although Martin has stressed that the show and the books are meant to be treated and enjoyed as separate entities, how the series's conclusion will affect the books, since Martin still isn't finished writing them, is pretty interesting to think about.
You might have to wait until 2019 to find out.
