Game of Thrones season 7 was pushed back several months from the usual April-May premiere to July and the fans have not been happy about this. However, the fans might have something bigger to worry about as the HBO programming president Casey Bloys in an interview to EW suggested that there’s a possiblility of Game of Thrones season 8 coming out in 2019, instead of 2018! He also gave more information regarding the spinoffs and what we can expect.
It was recently releaved that HBO has been working on 4 Game of Thrones spinoff ideas and later George R. R. Martin revealed that there were infact 5 spinoffs that they were working on, instead of 4 and it gave the fans a reason to celebrate as it ensured that the stories from their favoourite fantasy series would continue long after the series got over. However, Bloys said the spinoffs are “in a really embryonic process” and that he hadn’t even seen the outlines. He further added:
“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.”
So this makes it pretty clear that even though HBO is working on 5 Game of Thrones spinoff ideas (even though Bloys still talks about 4), they might eventually settle down for just one or two from the list. He also said that the bar was set really high by Game of Thrones and he wanted to make sure that the prequel feels worthy.
As a result, it might take some time to finalize an idea that’s unique. Regarding the potential release dates for the spinoffs, he also revealed that at the moment their main priority is making Game of Thrones as good as possible.
“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.”
He also confirmed that Benioff and Weiss who have been working on the show since the start, won’t be involved with the spinoffs.
“In conversations with them, they feel if their name is on the prequels — even in a passive way — it conveys some sort of expectation or responsibility. They want to enjoy the show as fans and don’t want to worry about the scripts or production issues. We were hoping to have their names on it out of respect for them, but we understand why they don’t want that.”
However, the most interesting part of the interview was when Bloys was asked whether the 8th season would air in 2018 as usual or 2019 depending on the needs and the answer was, “Yeah,” instead of a straightforward no, which does mean that there’s a possibility that the showrunners might pushback the final season, just like they did with season 7.
“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.”
Although this isn’t a confirmation from his side that the final season will release in 2019 but now it does feel that there’s a possibility of it happening, however tiny it might be and that might make the fans really unhappy as it will be a huge gap between the 2 seasons. He then talked more about the spinoffs, which are all sequels and confirmed that none of the original cast would be a prt of it.
In the end, he was asked if he had seen a cut of the Game of Thrones season 7 premiere and his answer has just made us excited for the season premiere. “I don’t want to oversell, but I can’t imagine anybody being disappointed in this season. It’s amazing.”
Game of Thrones season 7 premieres on 16th July.
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