Why are the sets from Game of Thrones season 8 still standing?

Game of Thrones aired its final season this past spring. It was a massive undertaking requiring the building of enormous sets, including to-scale recreations of Winterfell and King’s Landing. All these months later, those sets are largely still standing.

First, let’s take a look at the Winterfell set in Moneyglass, Northern Ireland:

Winterfell has been shot at a variety of places over the years, including at Castle Ward in County Down. But for season 8, the crew knew they were going to put the Stark home base through the ringer, so they greatly expanded the set at Moneyglass and added in a ton of detail.

The set is now secured by a simple chain link fence to keep unwanted visitors out, but it’s still very much there.

Meanwhile, HBO built a massive King’s Landing set built on a backlot at Titanic Studios in Belfast. This set also doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, despite the pounding it took filming Daenerys’ assault atop Drogon in “The Bells.”

Likewise, several exterior sets at Linen Mill Studios in Corbet-Banbridge have yet to be taken down. Lots of stuff was filmed at this location, from scenes at Riverrun to the Greyjoy sea battle in season 7.

So why are all these sets still standing? The simplest explanation is that the production just hasn’t gotten around to tearing them down, but that seems unlikely. In the case of the King’s Landing set, we’d heard long before filming was complete that the intention was to keep the set up afterward as a tourist attraction. Likewise, Linen Mill Studios will play host to the Game of Thrones Studio Tour, and it’s not hard to picture tourists wanting to visit Winterfell, too. Maybe these sets are here for the foreseeable future and will eventually be open to the public.

There’s also the possibility of using the sets for future productions. HBO recently completed filming on the pilot for its Game of Thrones prequel series. That series is set thousands of years before Thrones, well before many of the castles and cities we know — including King’s Landing — are even built. (Winterfell was already around, though.) But filmmakers could still repurpose any of these sets to stand in for other locations, even if it’s unlikely they’ll appear in the prequel.

And let’s remember, HBO is considering making other prequels, at least if you believe George R.R. Martin. The Song of Ice and Fire author recently said that the other prequel series “are drawn in large part from Fire and Blood, the book of Targaryen history that I had out in November.” Among other things, that book tells the story of Aegon Targaryen’s invasion of Westeros, which happened when most of the landmarks we know and love are around, or in the case of King’s Landing, in the process of being built.

So perhaps HBO is simply in a holding pattern when it comes to tearing down the sets, as they work their way through which pilot ends up going to series. Given the extensive cost of many of those sets, that makes sense.

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