Although Game Of Thrones is on track to begin shooting this month, there are signs that the winter we’ve all been waiting for won’t be coming in 2018. Liam Cunningham, who plays Ser Davos, told TV Guide the other day that season eight’s episodes will all have longer runtimes. He’s surmised this because “we’re filming right up until the summer. When you think about it, up until last season we’d have six months to do ten episodes, so we’re [doing] way more than that for six episodes. So that obviously will translate into longer episodes.”
Supersized episodes are all fine and good, but even with the first table read set for this Sunday (according to Cunningham), that projected “until the summer” date seems to spell doom for a 2018 premiere, because Cunningham is obviously not talking about summer 2017, which is a thing of the past. And as Entertainment Weekly has noted, filming usually wraps in December. This has fans and outlets thinking we won’t see the remaining six episodes in the series until 2019. But maybe we can take some solace in the knowledge that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are going all out for the finale, for which they’ll shoot various endings to avoid spoilers. And no one’s come right out yet and said that we’ll have to wait until 2019, though the odds aren’t looking good right now.