"Game of Thrones" season 6 is set to premiere later this month and there are already talks of how showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will end the series. According to a report from Variety, the showrunners are now considering ending the series with shortened seasons.
According to the report, season 7 will potentially have 7 episodes while season 8 will only have 6 episodes, totalling up to 13 episodes for both seasons combined. This is significantly shorter than previous seasons, which have 10 episodes each. The report does state that these numbers are not yet final as planning for future seasons is still underway.
"I think we're down to our final 13 episodes after this season. We're heading into the final lap," Benioff explained. "That's the guess, though nothing is yet set in stone, but that's what we're looking at."
Weiss later explained that the decision to go with shorter seasons is to ensure that they can maintain the level of quality that fans expect from a show like "Game of Thrones," which has won multiple Emmy awards in the past. According to Weiss, the show is now entering a "mid-range movie schedule" instead of the typical schedule for producing a television series.
HBO programming president Michael Lombardo explained that no concrete plans have yet been negotiated and that they are still discussing the future of "Game of Thrones" with the showrunners and the production company behind the series.
Fans have also speculated that the choice to cut the ending seasons a little shorter stems from the fact that the showrunners no longer have a book to base their work on, since "Game of Thrones" has now surpassed the books by George R.R. Martin.
While Martin may have told them how the series ends, they will not have a thick resource to build a lot of episodes on and will simply need to make the final episodes as bombastic and grand-scale as possible while delivering the ending that was relayed to them.
"Game of Thrones" season 6 will premiere this April 24 while production for season 7 begins in summer.
