20 takeaways from Fire Cannot Kill A Dragon, behind the scenes of Game of Thrones

NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 03: David Benioff and D.B. Weiss attend the Season 8 premiere of “Game of Thrones” at Radio City Music Hall on April 3, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

19. It was always the showrunners’ plan to end Game of Thrones in around seven seasons

The final two seasons of Game of Thrones received a ton of push back, and unfortunately, in the age of the Internet, that translated to its showrunners getting blasted with a lot of negativity. You’ve probably heard of the much-circulated petition to redo the final season with “competent writers”? The fandom has been pretty rough on Benioff and Weiss, considering that Game of Thrones literally would not have gotten made without them.

I admit, I have a tendency to defend them, despite the issues the last two seasons had. There’s just too much good on Thrones to not be grateful for its existence, and its existence is inextricably linked to Benioff and Weiss.

Maybe that’s why it grates on me so much when I hear people say they think the showrunners rushed to end Game of Thrones early with fewer episodes than it required so that they could work on another project, like their now-canceled Star Wars trilogy for Disney. Thankfully, Hibberd addresses this complaint in his book, confirming that it was always Benioff and Weiss’s plan to end the show with roughly the number of episodes that they did.

The way that Hibberd gets the point across is pretty clever, really. Since he was lucky enough to cover Thrones for nearly the entirety of its run, Hibberd had an archive of interviews to draw from. So what did he do, exactly? He took quotes from Benioff and Weiss from over the years and put them all together. Laid. out like that, it’s pretty hard to dispute that it was the showrunners’ plan to end the show when they did since it started in 2011.

“We went into this with the potentially overambitious notion that to get to the end, we would have seventy or eighty or however many hours,” showrunner Dan Weiss said, while filming season 2.

“Seven seasons is the plan,” Benioff affirmed during the filming of season 4. “Season four is right down the middle, the pivot point. Seven gods, seven kingdoms, seven seasons — it feels right to us.”

There are a few more quotes like that, but you get the picture. Maybe now that Hibberd has succinctly compiled all these quotes, that baseless complaint can finally be laid to rest…

But hey, it’s the Internet. I’m not holding my breath.