As Game Of Thrones moves toward its inevitable and icy endgame, fans might need to prepare themselves for yet another wintry delay. The show was already forced—by unavoidable weather troubles—to blow past its usual April premiere date for the upcoming seventh season (which debuts instead on July 16), and now it’s sounding like the eighth and final one might not arrive until as late as 2019. That’s per an Entertainment Weekly interview with HBO’s Casey Bloys, who noted that the show’s upcoming production schedule is currently way up in the air, as showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss prepare to write the grand finale to their landmark HBO show.
The irony, of course, is that the show’s final two seasons will be its shortest yet, with season 7 clocking in at 7 episodes, and season 8 at 6. Not that we begrudge Benioff and Weiss a little extra working time, since writing the end of TV’s biggest fantasy series ever seems like a pretty hefty landing to stick. (Besides, even if the duo took another decade or so to finish the series, they’d still be lapping author George R.R. Martin by a pretty healthy margin.)
Plus, it’s not like Bloys said “2019, definitely, so suck it, waiters,” so much as he simply refused to nail the network to a timetable for the show’s final season. Meanwhile, he also discussed the status of the show’s previously announced prequel spin-offs, reminding fans that only one of them is expected to make it to air. “The bar is so high,” Bloys noted. “If you only developed one, everything would rest on that one shot.”