Game of Thrones season 8 filming in October
In a new interview with Collider while promoting his new movie “Shot Caller,” none other than Jaime Lannister himself in actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau had the following to say regarding both the filming start time for Game of Thrones season 8 and how he tends to learn about the story of the show as the scripts start to come out:
“I knew what was going to happen for the first three seasons. After that, it’s been a season at a time. You get the scripts a month before we start shooting, or six weeks, and then you know what’s going to happen that season. But, I don’t know what’s going to happen next season. We go back in October, so maybe in the next few weeks, we’ll get the scripts and I’ll find out. I’m very curious.”
October is the latest that a Game of Thrones season has started in terms of filming episodes, but that does make some sense given that the show is trying to present a more frosty version of Westeros these days to perfectly mirror the longstanding “Winter is Coming” motto that they have. (Let’s just hope they don’t do the silly live-stream to announce the premiere date through a melting block of ice again.) Just because filming is starting later, however, doesn’t guarantee that these episodes will be shorter. Remember that this season has the longest episode in history in the upcoming season 7 finale. Meanwhile, there are rumors already about there being a number of super-sized episodes next year. It could be a case where the six final episodes actually come out to equal the same amount of content as eight normal episodes of the show, or even nine or ten episodes of a show that runs 42-43 minutes with commercials.
Our main point that we’re making here is this: Even if it feels like you’re getting less Game of Thrones content with a shorter episode count, that isn’t necessarily the case. The show is just going to structure them out differently.
What happens beyond season 8?
Odds are, you’ve heard a little bit about this already, as there are plans to look at a number of different spin-off series ideas. At least one of them will probably get made (HBO is already incredibly invested in this world as are the fans), though it’s hard to imagine that a new show will get anywhere near the audience that the current one has. There could be very much a sentiment out there that some of the viewers of the original went through that whole journey, and they are content with that and don’t need anything more.
Yesterday, we did report about how one of the spin-off ideas revolves around some major event that took place in the history of Westeros. You can read more about that over at the link here. (Photo: HBO.)