Five seasons in, and with season six on the verge of a triumphant return on April 24, HBO showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have teased that Game of Thrones is “approaching the finish line.”
Now blazing past George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire for the first time, Benioff and Weiss touched base on the seemingly imminent endgame in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Aiming to round off HBO’s beloved political drama in one coherent swoop, the showrunners revealed that, “we’re not walking away. We’re approaching the finish line. From the outset, our hope was to tell a complete story — beginning, middle and end. We are writing the final act now, and the last thing we want to do is stay on stage after the play is over.”
As two of the precious few people on planet Earth that are in on Martin’s conclusive plans for Game of Thrones, further in the interview, Benioff and Weiss spoke more about the show’s immediate future now that it’s surpassed the author’s literary schedule, and Winds of Winter in particular.
We realized we’d probably catch the books when we spent several days with George in Santa Fe in 2013, discussing the future of the book series and the television series. George’s schedule is very much his own, as it should be for a novelist. But we’re locked into a set schedule — a new season every year. In the beginning, we hoped that if the show worked, we’d get seven seasons to tell the tale. Seven kingdoms, seven gods, seven books — seven felt like a lucky number. The actual messiness of storytelling might not be quite that numerologically elegant, but we’re looking at somewhere between 70 and 75 hours before the credits roll for the last time.
Look for Game of Thrones season 6 to roar onto the small screen in time for Sunday, April 24. The road doesn’t end there, however, after HBO renewed the award-winning drama for a seventh season; but it could be a much shorter run of episodes than the standard 10-episode season.
