HBO's chairman says Game Of Thrones' final season is more like 6 movies
We still have three more months before Game Of Thrones returns for its eighth and final season, but that doesn’t mean HBO isn’t happy to get the hype machine up and running well in advance, as the release of its promo reel this past weekend demonstrated. Oh, and as long as someone, somewhere, is wondering, HBO CEO Richard Plepler is happy to answer: Why, yes, the final season of GoT actually is pretty great, glad you asked!
To be fair to the man, it would be incredibly hard to have seen rough cuts of all six episodes that make up the last season of the biggest hit in the history of HBO and not talk about constantly. But his job is also to make everything HBO does sound like it’s the greatest television production the medium ever created, and on that count, he was in fine form at the pay-cable giant’s post-Golden Globes party on Sunday night. Since there wasn’t much in the way of victory speeches for the channel this year (the only prize for any of its programming was Patricia Clarkson’s Best Supporting Actress win for Sharp Objects), talk naturally turned to the 800-ton dragon in the room.
“It’s a spectacle. The guys have done six movies. The reaction I had while watching them was, ‘I’m watching a movie,’” Plepler informed Variety during the event. The “movie” analogy would seem to back up the rumors that almost every one of the last six episodes is closer to 90 minutes than an hour. Would you also like some hyperbole with your implication regarding the length of the conclusion of Game Of Thrones? Plepler has you covered. “They knew the bar was high,” he said of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. “They’ve exceeded the bar. I’ve watched them twice without any CGI and I’m in awe. Everybody’s in for an extraordinary treat of storytelling and of magical, magical production.” We’ll go ahead and assume the “them” he’s referring to are the actual episodes, not Benioff and Weiss themselves, though perhaps they’re just extremely good-looking gentlemen.
Game Of Thrones returns in April, and HBO still has yet to announce the specific date.