'Game of Thrones' Stars Sign New Contracts

You can rest assured that Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister and Jaime Lannister will back on Game of Thrones next season because the actors that play those characters - Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau - have all signed lucrative new contracts that will keep them on board the series for its seventh and eighth seasons.

The contracts will reportedly pay the actors nearly half a million dollars each per episode, a number that's a big pay raise and that will make the cast among the highest paid on cable TV. HBO can afford the healthy per-episode bump because the seventh and eighth seasons - the latter of which is likely to be the series' last - will reportedly be significantly shorter than previous seasons. That means viewers will get much less bang for their subscription buck, but the actors will see a greatly increased return on their on-camera investment.

Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams, who play Sansa and Arya Stark, have not yet signed new contracts.

Game of Thrones wraps up its sixth season on June 26, and the seventh season is expected to begin sometime in late April 2017.