‘Game of Thrones’ Fans Might Need to Wait Two Years for the Final Season

It appears 'Game of Thrones' fans might need to wait until 2019 for the final season.

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Game of Thrones fans are eagerly anticipating Season Seven, which premieres July 16. You might be so focused on Season Seven that you aren’t thinking ahead to Season Eight, but in case you are: it seems HBO is going to take its time to release the final season.

HBO programming president Casey Bloys spoke with Entertainment Weekly and said he’ll be giving Emmy-winning showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff plenty of time to create the final season, which will contain six episodes. Bloys said the final season will air in 2018 or perhaps even 2019 depending on how much time Weiss and Benioff need.

"They have to write the episodes and figure out the production schedule," Bloys said. "We'll have a better sense of [when it will air] once they get further into the writing."

If you’re wondering whether this has anything to do with the multiple Game of Thrones prequel spin-offs that are currently in development: it doesn’t.

"I haven’t even seen outlines," Bloys said. "In the press at large, everybody said, 'there are four spinoffs' and they assume that means each one is happening and we’re going to have a new Game of Thrones show per quarter. That’s not what’s going on. The idea is not to do four shows. The bar set by [Benioff and Weiss] is so high that my hope is to get one show that lives up to it. Also, this is a long-term plan. Our No. 1 goal is the seventh season this summer and getting the eighth season written and aired."

Bloys said the network’s full focus is on Game of Thrones itself.

"We want to focus on Season Seven and Eight," Bloys said. "If any of these scripts come to pass, you're not going to see anything air anytime close to the Season Eight finale."

Bloys also said Weiss and Benioff will not be involved in the prequels. The showrunners have been working on Game of Thrones, and only Game of Thrones, for 12 years, and they want to enjoy the next iteration as fans without worrying about scripts or production issues.

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