Michael Lombardo, president of HBO Programming, said at the Television Critics Association press event today that the oft-quoted “seven seasons” plan for Game of Thrones is now out the window. Instead, the showrunners currently believe it’ll take eight years to finish the story.
Here’s Lombardo’s exact quote:
Seven seasons and out was never the case. The question is how much beyond [seven seasons] it will go.
... David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] are feeling there are two more years after Season 6, that’s what we’re looking at right now. We hope that they would change their mind, but for that’s how they are feeling now.
Lombardo added that, if they wanted to make a prequel series, HBO would be open to “anything” they wanted to do. Of course they would, no one wants to lose a tentpole show.
We can also speculate rampantly about what it means that Weiss and Benioff now think they need eight seasons. Is it that they’ve figured out that the story is much longer than they originally thought? Or do they know something about what’s in the future for the books that another season is needed? The show’s been working through the books at a pretty rapid rate — condensing and cutting and remixing — this might mark a return to a slightly more drawn out kind of adaptation. Of course, no one but the writers knows for sure.
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