HBO plans a return to Seville to film Game of Thrones season 8 in the spring of 2018

During filming for Game of Thrones season 7, HBO spent a good deal of time in Seville, shooting at the ruins of Italica, an ancient amphitheater, and in the city’s Royal Shipyards. These two locations stood in for the same spot in King’s Landing, and word is the scenes filmed there will be very important to the storyline of season 7.

Now, it’s starting to sound like it’ll be important to the eighth and final season, too. According to an ABC affiliate in Seville, HBO has reached out to the government of Andalusia to request it be allowed to film scenes for season 8 in those two locations — apparently, they’re “essential” for the plot. HBO wants to film these scenes in the spring of 2018.

There’s a potential problem. The Shipyards, a historic monument, are scheduled to undergo rehabilitation in March of 2018, which may make filming during that time period difficult. The Andalusian government, no doubt mindful of all the tourist dollars Game of Thrones brings in, is trying to accommodate HBO, but if it can’t, the network is prepared to just skip shooting in Seville entirely (remember, the ruins of Italica and the Royal Shipyards stand in for the same location in King’s Landing) and shoot the required scenes on sound stages in Northern Ireland.

Let’s drill down on the idea of HBO filming season 8 in March, because it has some alarming implications. By that point in the year, HBO is generally done with principal photography on any given season of Game of Thrones. If it’s planning a location shoot for March of 2018, production will likely run later than usual, which means season 8 will air later than usual.

Image credit: Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons, License CC-BY-SA 4.0

How much later? Well, when HBO programming president Casey Bloys sat down with Entertainment Weekly not long ago, it asked him if season 8 could potentially air in 2019…and he didn’t say no. “[Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] have to write the episodes and figure out the production schedule,” he said. “We’ll have a better sense of that once they get further into the writing.”

By the looks of things, the production schedule is firming up. We’ll have to wait to find out what exactly it means, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the wait for season 8 was even longer than the wait for season 7.

Next: Kit Harington: Jon Snow is 'in mortal danger like anyone else'

h/t Los Siete Reinos