Will HBO remake Game of Thrones season 8?

HBO is currently in the midst of celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Game of Thrones. It’s putting out new merch, shining a spotlight on charities, running marathons, making lots of behind-the-scenes videos available on HBO Max, and even released a newly cut trailer for the eighth and final season of the show:

These efforts are definitely getting people talking about the show and its future more than usual, but this new trailer underlines how some fans are still sore over what they see as a disappointing end to the series. It has far more dislikes than likes, and the comments are full of people snarking about the how the ending let them down and wondering whether HBO can remake the final episodes.

In fact, there have been calls for a season 8 redux pretty much since it aired; remember that petition that gathered almost 2 million signatures? James Hibberd over at The Hollywood Reporter took a look at whether the prospect of a remake was realistic, and had some interesting insights.

Game of Thrones season 8 vs. Justice League

On the surface, the answer to, “Will HBO remake Game of Thrones season 8″ is a simple, “No.” Or at least, it would be pretty unprecedented, not to mention nearly impossible logistically. Game of Thrones had a huge cast, and scheduling things so all of them could come back between their current projects would be a nightmare. What’s more, many of the actors have said that they’re happy with their work on the final season and probably aren’t eager to return, and even if they weren’t happy with it or don’t care one way or another, it’s over; they’ve moved on.

And yet, HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia did pull off a kind of remake recently with Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a souped up version of the 2017 Justice League movie that preserves director Zack Snyder’s original vision. But the two situations aren’t really comparable. Although there is new footage in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the great majority of it is footage that was already shot but not used in the original movie, so the difficulty of wrangling the actors to come back was greatly reduced. That’s pretty different from what fans want out of a Game of Thrones season 8 remake.

Also, while Justice League underperformed at the box office in 2017 and led to a premature winding down of the DCEU as imagined by Zack Snyder, the final season of Game of Thrones was a huge success, despite how much hate it gets online. It brought HBO the best ratings in the network’s history, won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and multiple polls have found that most viewers were satisfied with it. And far from killing the Game of Thrones universe, the final season has led to an explosion of new projects, including seven potential spin-off series and a Broadway play.

Now, will those spin-offs actually be good? Will they be popular? Will they have legs? All that remains to be seen, but HBO clearly has confidence in the series, which means it’s probably not eager to redo the final season anytime soon.

Possibilities for a Game of Thrones season 8 remake

But if you’re still holding out hope for a remake of season 8, here’s a few scraps to cling to: While I don’t see HBO revisiting the end of the original show, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin does still have two books left in this series to write: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Game of Thrones famously adapted these books but had to forge its own path once it ran out of printed material, which is when most of the criticism from fans started.

Many of the Game of Thrones spin-offs in development are based on Martin’s work outside ASOIAF, a lot of which is far thinner than what he wrote for his mainline novel series. After Winds and Dream come out, HBO may want to use that detailed roadmap to create an alternate version of the ending. Martin has said in the past that while he gave the broad strokes of the ending to Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the particulars will be different, and I think a lot of fans would agree that it comes down to execution anyway.

All that said, given how long Martin takes to write, something like this wouldn’t happen for years down the road (if it happens at all), and would probably need to use a different cast.

There’s also the possibility that HBO could just remake the whole series in another form. Remember those seven spin-offs in development? Well, one of them is an animated drama that will be “similar in tone” to the original show. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if that might not be a from-the-ground-up remake that would preserve the particulars of A Song of Ice and Fire that were cut from the live-action show. Dragons and zombie armies aren’t as expensive in animated form, after all.

Or not. Honestly, I don’t know what the future holds for Game of Thrones, but I’m curious to find out.

How about you? Is a remake of the final season something you want, and if so, in what form?

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