Following what many agree to be the best season in the show’s run, “Game of Thrones” co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have confirmed long-swirling rumors that the final two seasons of the HBO hit series will be significantly shorter in episode count.
“It’s two more seasons we’re talking about. From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70-75 hours, and that’s what we’ll end up with,” Benioff told Deadline Hollywood. “Call it 73 for now.”
Every season of “Game of Thrones” so far has been composed of 10 episodes, with 60 hours total over the show’s six season run. To hit Benioff’s projected target, the show would only have to produce 13-15 more episodes before calling it quits. The popular thinking has been that season seven will have seven episodes and that season eight will have six, though that has not been confirmed to this point.
“We’re trying to tell one cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end,” Benioff continued. “We’ve known the end for quite some time and we’re hurtling towards it. Those last images from the [season six finale] showed that. Daenerys is finally coming back to Westeros; Jon Snow is king of the North and Cersei is sitting on the Iron Throne. And we know the Night King is up there, waiting for all of them. The pieces are on the board now.
“The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story.”
“Game of Thrones” will return for a seventh season in 2017.