After months of antagonising fans with vague dates and long waits, HBO has finally provided details about when the final season of Game of Thrones will air: April 2019!
The news comes soon after Entertainment Weekly confirmed that the Game of Thrones prequel will not start shooting until early 2019, debunking rumours that production would begin in October.
“I don’t know where that report came from, we’re hoping to go into production in early ’19,” HBO’s programming president Casey Bloys said.
The last concrete news we had about a Game of Thrones Season 8 premiere date came last year, when Bloys explained that these episodes would take much longer to produce, pushing the final season back a year.
"It's a big season, so they're trying to get a sense of how long it'll take them to shoot this ... They've talked about the length; I imagine they'll be longer but I truly don't know like, 'oh they'll be 80 minutes each,' or whatever, I'm not sure."
And that means the proposed four spin-offs wouldn't air for a year after the series finale, meaning they could premiere as late as 2020.
"The number one priority in all of this is the final season of Game of Thrones, I don't wanna do anything with a spinoff or anything that detracts or distracts from that," he said last year. "So that season will happen, and my guess is it would be at least a year before you see anything else."
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
