The good news is that season 8 of HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones is already in the works. The bad news is that it won’t actually hit the airwaves until 2019. As we detailed previously, the final season of Game of Thrones will only feature six episodes, though there are rumblings that each episode may be as long as a full length movie, which is to say somewhere in the hour and a half range.
“We know we have six episodes,” series star Kit Harington said in an interview earlier this month, we are not sure whether they will run for 70 minutes or even 90 minutes.”
With a conclusion to current GOT story lines on the horizon, ardent fans of the series won’t have to worry about what to do with their Sunday nights once the series comes to what we imagine will be a dramatic end. Indeed, HBO has already green-lit the development of not one, but five GOT prequels.
As exciting as that is, don’t expect a GOT prequel to land on HBO anytime soon. Speaking on the topic recently, HBO programming chief Casey Bloys said that any prequels that ultimately go into production won’t arrive until 2020 at the absolute earliest.
As to the five prequels currently in the works, Bloys recently explained:
They’re all on different schedules. They didn’t start at the same startlines, so we’re at different stages, but I’m very encouraged by what we’ve seen. I don’t have a timetable when we’re going to make decisions on anything. I could make between zero and five. Probably more likely around one.
“I want the final season of Game of Thrones to be the final season of Game Of Thrones,” Bloys later said to Deadline. “I don’t want to use it to launch something else, I want it to stand as the finale of the greatest tv show of all time, I don’t want to do anything that infringes on that.”
Incidentally, GOT author George RR Martin is reportedly involved in two of the potential prequels. What’s more, he has emphatically stated that the new shows in development are decidedly not spin-offs, but prequels in the purest sense of the word.
