David Benioff and Dan Weiss already confirmed that “Games of Thrones” Season 8 would be only composed of six episodes. The showrunners of the epic fantasy graced the featured speaker panel at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas on Sunday.
It looks like the show is getting fewer and fewer episodes as “Game of Thrones” Season 7 would only have seven chapters from the usual ten installments. It has been said that the fewer episodes will make way for the show to have a bigger budget that would make it more impressive.
A movie-like final chapter
“It’s only going to be six episodes for the final season,” David Benioff confirmed per Entertainment Weekly. He then explained that they first wanted to tell “Game of Thrones” Season 8 as a 70-hour movie. However, it would turn out to be a 73-hour movie like that will still stick to its original theme that has a beginning, middle and a nearing end.
“It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way, I’m very happy we’ve kept everyone, and we get to finish it the way we want to,” he added. The filming of the seventh season has now wrapped up, and the showrunners are now preparing for the final chapter.
In fact, they have now divided who is going to write each episode.
“We argued over who got to kill Sansa,” he teased.
The division of writing episodes
Benioff will be writing the season premiere while Bryan Cogman will pen the episode second chapter. The rest of the installments will be then handled by the two.
Usually, the showrunners only spend two minutes to assign who's going to write an individual episode.
Now, they took “18 back and forth emails” before they finally decide. There were haggles like they were going to this if the other one will do that. Then they come to realize that this will be the last time that they were going to this for the show.
Aside from the two showrunners, the “Game of Thrones” panel was also hosted by Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, who plays the Stark sisters Arya and Sansa who have a love-and-hate relationship. They, too, talked about the possibility of a spinoff as HBO already showed their interest. However, they won’t be part of it.
