COURTESY HBO
This article originally appeared on Time.
The Game is almost over—but fans may have to wait more than a year to find out what happens to Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen and the rest of the Westerosi on Game of Thrones.
WHEN DOES GAMES OF THRONES SEASON 8 START?
Unfortunately, we don’t have a Game of Thrones Season 8 premiere date yet. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister, told Collider that the final season of the show will start production in October. If the show follows a similar schedule as it has in the past, that means Game of Thrones Season 8 could start as early as next summer or as late as spring 2019, depending on how long and CGI-intensive the episodes are.
Casey Bloys, HBO’s head of programming warned Entertainment Weekly in June that fans may have to go 18 months without dragons and direwolves. The episodes could drop at the end of 2018 or sometime in 2019.
In the past, HBO has released a Game of Thrones air date a few months before the new season premiered.
HOW MANY EPISODES ARE THERE IN SEASON 8 OF GAME OF THRONES?
HBO split the final 13 episodes of Game of Thrones into two shorter seasons. The show will wrap its truncated seventh season on Sunday night. Season 8 will consist of six episodes. At the Television Critics Association summer press tour, Bloys spoke about whether the new episodes would be supersize: “We haven’t had that discussion yet because I don’t know how long the episodes are gonna be. Two hours per episode seems like it would be excessive, but it’s a great show, so who knows?”
In an interview with TIME in March, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss told us that they “know what happens in every scene.”
HOW MANY MORE SEASONS OF GAME OF THRONES ARE THERE?
Season 8 will be the final season of Game of Thrones. However, HBO has announced that they are working on four spinoffs for the hit fantasy series. In July, Bloys told reporters that any spinoff will premiere “at least a year” after the final season. Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will not write any of the spinoffs.
