Now that the dust has settled and the excitement has died down a bit from the Sunday night reveal that Game of Thrones is returning April 14 for the start of its eighth and final season, the next milestone that fans are awaiting is when the heck we’ll get a full, genuine trailer for the new season. Sunday night, of course, gave us a brief teaser of new footage, and there were also snippets of new footage in HBO’s 2019 highlights reel it showed earlier this month — but we’re talking about a longer actual trailer that serves to amp up the excitement level around the new season even more.
At this point, at least we can say — a full trailer is definitely coming. That’s according to showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss themselves.
Entertainment Weekly put the question directly to them: Are we going to actually get a trailer, or is GoT so big and anticipation so high that you really don’t need one to, you know, get the word out about the new season?
By way of answering that, Benioff started ruminating on director David Lynch’s wish that there wasn’t even such a thing as trailers at all. That you’d just go to the theater, sit down and get by and large surprised by the movie you’re there to see. “I wish there were no trailers,” Weiss said. “I just want somebody to say, ‘Trust me, go see this.'”
When the EW reporter theorized that GoT could get away with that, Weiss replied: “We won’t [do it] though. Because then when we went and saw Ready Player One with our kids and they played the Westworld trailer and it looked great. And we’re like, ‘Ah, we should do that.'”
So there you have it. Winter is coming, and so is at least one trailer for season 8.
Production on the season has been wrapped for several months, so presumably they already have the footage they need to work up a trailer. It’s a good bet we may be in store for only one before the April 14 premiere, though, since the danger here is giving too much away, and it’s not like HBO needs to get started early to build up interest among fans.
Here, again, is the brief teaser containing new footage that HBO included along with its announcement on Sunday:
April 14. #ForTheThrone pic.twitter.com/Mzy22yxM6Z
— Game of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) January 14, 2019
