This past weekend’s Golden Globe Awards are still yielding useful bits of information. Particularly, this interview with Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth) has some juicy nuggets in it.
“We’re still filming,” he says. “We don’t finish until the end of [February]. That’s seven episodes. And then we start again in September and there’s a final six.”
First of all, his note about filming through the end of February lines up with what other cast members have said. And the bit about there being six episodes in the eighth and final season is also consistent with what we’ve heard.
But the most useful piece of intel is that Game of Thrones Season 8 will start filming in September of this year. Filming for Game of Thrones Season 7 started in September of last year. Note that, for the first six seasons of the show, the cast and crew filmed roughly from July through December. For Season 7, they pushed that date back so they could take advantage of naturally snowy conditions in, for example, Iceland. Winter, after all, has come to Westeros, and the show wants to film in the dead of actual winter to maintain verisimilitude.
If the show is filming Season 8 starting in September, that probably means it’ll also run through the winter of 2017/2018, meaning we could be in for a snowy final season.