Game of Thrones season 7: Even the showrunners didn’t love ice-block stunt

Earlier this year, someone at HBO thought they had a great idea to announce the Game of Thrones season 7 premiere date in an ice-block stunt that included such highlights as … well, there weren’t any. The Facebook Live stream crashed repeatedly, and we never really got anywhere other than feeling embarrassed that we sat through it just to get a premiere date that we already forgot about.

(Correction — we did. We went and read our article about it, so we remember now.)

Anyway, back to the point — the ice-block stunt was ridiculous, needless, and served no real purpose other than to generate hype around something that other networks hand out like it’s no big deal. Apparently, the showrunners weren’t quite fans of it either.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Beast, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (who is promoting his new movie Small Crimes) said the following when talking about the overall-cheesy gimmick:

“I spoke to Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff] about that and they were like, ‘Oh god… That’s embarrassing.’ Everyone was like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘What’s going to happen?!’ ‘It’s melting!’ ‘It crashed!’ ‘Oh my god!’ It’s like, just walk away… just walk away. It’s just a date! You know, I was actually thinking, ‘Is there going to be a backlash and people will think, ‘F–k you guys for that!’’ but that’s really happened with every time the show kills off a major character: Never again! F–k you! I’m never going to watch this show! and, you know, they keep coming back.”

Ultimately, the ice-block stunt is just one of those things associated with the show that you just try your best to forget. It’s kind of like Olly that way, or part of the Dorne storyline when we saw it introduced for the first time. (There’s is an above-zero chance that Dorne is going to get awesome sooner rather than later now that Varys is there.) When the show comes back on, we’ll forget everything else and get immersed again. The one part of it that’s going to be hard is the sole fact that we’re talking about only seven episodes before another long hiatus … and then only six.

Did you appreciate the effort behind the stunt, but hate the expectation of it? Share in the comments below, and head over here if you’re interested in seeing some other Game of Thrones news and insight. (Photo: HBO.)