We still don’t know if we’ll have to wait one year or two for the final season of Game Of Thrones. But in either case, it will still probably feel like an eternity, and there will certainly be obsessive documenting of even the tiniest of hints at who will survive the looming war between the living and the White Walkers. But all that poring over blurry photos has inspired the premium-cable network to try to fake out viewers and fan sites. In the tradition of other shows that drew fanatical devotion, HBO president Casey Bloys says David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will shoot multiple versions of the finale to prevent spoilers.
That comes from The Morning Call, which caught Bloys’ recent talk at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s Moravian College. The HBO exec was on hand to discuss “the challenge of writing a great ending,” invoking Seinfeld and The Sopranos’ finales as two examples of divisive conclusions. But given how quickly information travels these days, Thrones’ showrunners are “going to shoot multiple versions so that nobody really know what happens” ahead of the finale. “You have to do that on a long show,” Bloys notes, “because when you’re shooting something, people know. So they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that there’s no real definitive answer until the end.”
Bloys didn’t comment on the hack that led to an early release of multiple episodes this season (along with some Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes), and gave the network far more trouble than people snapping some pictures. The HBO president didn’t discuss the start of production for season eight, but he did tell The Hollywood Reporter late last month that the team is “trying to figure out a timeline for the shoot and how much time the special effects take.”