Game of Thrones Heading into Its 'Final Lap'

Earlier this year, HBO announced that it was negotiating with Game of Thrones' producers to bring the show back for two more seasons after the current sixth season. That touched off speculation that the series' eighth season might be its last, but it turns out that fans might be getting even less GoT in the future than they'd feared when they heard the announcement.

In an interview published by Variety this week, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss revealed that their plan for the rest of the series involves not just a total of eight seasons, but significantly shortened seventh and eighth seasons.

"I think we’re down to our final 13 episodes after this season. We’re heading into the final lap," Benioff told the magazine.

That would mean that instead of the typical 10 episodes per season, the seventh season would get seven episodes, and the final season would consist of only six, barely more than half the number that fans are used to. The showrunners claimed that they need more time to produce higher quality episodes, not that they need a plan to stretch a limited storyline over a two-year deal with HBO.

Variety says other sources say that it's too soon to be talking about the number of episodes in the final two seasons, but it seems all but definite that GoT will be finished by the end of 2018.