We’ve fought through five seasons of watching your favorite characters die, on Game of Thrones with Season 6 on the way. Odds are, at some point, you’ve shouted at your television “When will it all end?” Well, we may actually have the answer to that. HBO’s head of programming is now saying the show will likely wrap up for good at the end of Season 8.
The Wrap has the word from Michael Lombardo, the man in charge of what is seen on HBO, which came during the recent Television Critics Association press tour:
”Obviously we’re shooting Season 6 now, hopefully discussing seven. I think their feeling is we’re looking at two more seasons after six. I’m hoping they’ll change their minds, but that’s what we’re looking at right now.
When Lombardo says “their feeling” he’s referring to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. The ultimate authority on when the show will wrap up is being left entirely to them, which is nice. You'll also notice, Lombardo is quick to point out that he doesn’t want the show to end with Season 8, just that he thinks that’s the current plan. HBO certainly doesn’t want to see one of the most successful shows on television go away. Earlier, HBO said they were hoping for at least 10 seasons of the drama, but Benioff and Weiss have already expressed an interest in only 7 or 8, and it looks like they are getting their wish.
Eight seasons sounds about right if we're being honest. The book series the show is based on, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is planned as a seven book series and while we've already seen the television version stretch some books across multiple seasons, we've also seen them shuffle books together. Eights seasons for seven books sounds about right.
Of course, the question for HBO is: If the end of Game of Thrones is in sight, is what’s next? It was four years between the beginning of Thrones and the end of HBO’s last super popular series The Sopranos and it’s unlikely the cable giant will want to wait that long again. Luckily, HBO has some high profile projects, like Westworld, in the works.
So with Season 6 filming now, with an expectation to air in 2016, we can pencil in the end of Game of Thrones for sometime in 2018. Can they finish this thing up in another 30 episodes? That’s a lot of people to kill. While we're not excited that the show will end, we can't wait to see how it all pans out.
