Strip away the ostentatious throne rooms and inspiring tales of valor and it’s fair to say that the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros have been built on a blood-drenched foundation of sprawling wars, treason and fallen dynasties.
The end result is enough drama to fuel Game of Thrones, HBO’s fantasy flagship that’s now teetering on the verge of its seventh (and perhaps best?) season on the airwaves. Excitement is palpable, particularly now that the show-stopping first trailer has found its way online. But that scintillating teaser wasn’t the only Game of Thrones promo to hit the interwebs over the past few weeks, as Entertainment Weekly also gathered together some of the show’s many power players for a rather wonderful cover shoot.
As is often the case, those action shots were accompanied by a smattering of interviews with the likes of D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, along with Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) – as a matter of fact, the latter pair hinted at season 7’s breathless pace. Today, though, the focus is being placed not on the cast and crew, but rather, HBO programming president Casey Bloys, who’s offered up some interesting updates on season 8.
Firstly, he touched on when we can expect to see it premiere. While he refrained from giving an exact date, when EW asked if it could be late 2018/early 2019 that the final season arrives, Bloys said, “Yeah. They have to write the episodes and figure out the production schedule. We’ll have a better sense of that once they get further into the writing.”
What’s perhaps more interesting, however, is what he had to say about the various spinoffs in development. Though we still don’t know exactly which characters or even what part of this world they’ll focus on, Bloys explained the reasoning for developing multiple new shows based on Game of Thrones, rather than just one.
You couldn’t do this with a lot of shows. I’m talking with the drama group here, and the nice thing is George has created an entire universe. The fact that there’s enough material to even contemplate making different prequels is crazy when you think about it. George has all these histories he’s thought about and that’s one reason why the books are so good.
The other reason, frankly, as I said, is the bar is so high. If you only developed one, everything would rest on that one shot. It’s such a special show. I want to make sure that [any prequel] feels worthy. We have some amazing writers who want to take a shot at this. They’re also looking at different times in the universe and all will have different feels. This increases our odds of finding one that’s unique.
Finally, the HBO head honcho assured us that we won’t see the Game of Thrones series finale act as a gateway into the spinoffs, which will no doubt come as a relief to many fans.
“Making Game of Thrones as good as possible is the No. 1 goal, and then we’ll see about these other scripts. You’re not going to see a situation where the next show in the Thrones universe launches off the back of this one. The show that Dan and David have created will get its proper send off first. We wouldn’t want to take away from that in any way.”
The Great War is almost upon us, as Game of Thrones season 7 is on course to light up the small screen on July 16th. An eighth and final season will follow in late 2018/early 2019, and we now have official confirmation that the show’s last hurrah will release as a truncated six-parter. The only question that remains now, is, will you be tuning in to see who ultimately takes the Iron Throne? Let us know in the usual place.