Game of Thrones season 7 is over. I know, I know…we’re broken up about it, too. Now all there is to do is to buckle down and wait for season 8, the show’s final year. But when will that be?
The short answer is that we don’t know, which is like adding insult to injury: not only do we not have any more Game of Thrones to look forward to for the foreseeable future, but we don’t know when it’ll be back.
There are clues out there, though. For example, we know that the production will be returning to the ruins of Italica to shoot scenes for season 8, which likely means that we’ll see the Dragonpit again. And there’s already been activity around Moneyglass, Northern Ireland, where the outdoor set for Winterfell is located.
So at the moment, HBO is in pre-production. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) has said that filming should start up in October. Season 7 took around six months to film, and it premiered roughly six months after that. Assuming season 8 works on the same basic schedule, we could have it on our TVs by the fall of 2018!
Or not. When Entertainment Weekly asked him about it a couple of months back, HBO programming president Casey Bloys hinted that, at the time, there was no set premiere date, and that the show could conceivable premiere as late as 2019. ““They have to write the episodes and figure out the production schedule,” he said. “We’ll have a better sense of that once they get further into the writing.”
Since then, the scripts have gotten turned in, but we still don’t know if 2019 is off the table. For the sake of our sanity, we hope it is. The sooner we get more Game of Thrones, the better, even if it will be the show’s last hurrah.
To stay up to date on everything Game of Thrones, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels.
