Game of Thrones producers confirm final season only 6 episodes
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The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will indeed only be six episodes long, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss said Sunday.
“It’s only going to be six episodes for the final season,” Benioff said during a featured speaker panel at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. “From the beginning we’ve wanted to tell a 70-hour movie. It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it’s stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle and now we’re coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way, I’m very happy we’ve kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to.”
HBO has yet to announce the episode count for season 8, but with the upcoming seventh season now wrapped and the showrunners preparing the final run, the writer-producers seem certain of the number of hours, noting they’ve already divvied up who gets to write each episode.
“We argued over who got to kill Sansa,” Benioff quipped.
During the talk, producers also confirmed they will not be involved with any Game of Thrones spinoff or prequel series that HBO comes up with. “I think HBO might well do [another series] and I look forward to watching it and I think it be great, but I think they should get new blood in,” Benioff said.
The panel discussion featured producers Benioff and Weiss along with Thrones stars Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark). No footage was screened from the upcoming season and the team did not reveal any spoilers, but there was plenty of playful banter…