As we near the Game of Thrones Season 6 premiere on April 24, fans are preparing to settle in for 10 weeks of the very best storytelling on television. Now, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are talking about what comes after. They told Variety that the final two seasons of Game of Thrones may be much shorter than previous seasons, which have all been 10 episodes long. Here’s what Benioff said:
"I think we’re down to our final 13 episodes after this season. We’re heading into the final lap. That’s the guess, though nothing is yet set in stone, but that’s what we’re looking at."
The division of episodes will supposedly look like this:
- Seven episodes for Season 7
- Six episodes for Season 8
In July of 2015, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo broke the news that he expected Game of Thrones to go eight seasons.
"Seven-seasons-and-out has never been the [internal] conversation. The question is how much beyond seven are we going to do. [Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are] feel like there’s two more years after six. I would always love for them to change their minds. That’s what we’re looking at right now."
The 13-episode plan isn’t set in stone—Benioff and Weiss are still outlining the rest of the series—but it’s what the showrunners are aiming for. Lombardo said they were “still in conversations.”
Why make the final couple of seasons shorter? According to Variety, the showrunners feel that they can no longer live up to the standard they’ve set for themselves, and for the fans, given that the production grows in complexity every year. “It’s crossing out of a television schedule into more of a mid-range movie schedule,” Weiss said. It seems it’s getting harder to produce 10 episodes in the show’s usual 12 or 14 month filming time-frame. Shortening the final two years would allow them to focus more time on each episode.
Is there any way for the series to have two final seasons of 10 episodes apiece?
One solution would be to for the show to take a year off, which might give Benioff and Weiss time they need to organize the resources necessary to film two full seasons, not to mention give George R.R. Martin time to work on A Dream of Spring. HBO shows have done this before. For example, The Sopranos took a year off in between its fourth and fifth seasons.
HBO could also hand the reigns over to others and produce an abbreviated side-story season, something like what Starz did with Spartacus after lead actor Andy Whitfield was diagnosed with cancer. The network produced a prequel season that was extremely popular, hoping that Whitfield would be able to return the next season. Sadly, Whitfield passed away, but the prequel season was a hit.
As far as what prequel season most fans would want to see…I would love to see a mini-series depicting the events of Robert’s Rebellion that ended with the Targaryen children fleeing across the Narrow Sea.
We’ll report any further developments as they happen.