Fans of HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones have been patiently waiting on any news as to when the show will return for its final season, and yesterday during the Television Critics Association summer 2018 press tour they got a bit of an answer.
The president of HBO programming, Casey Bloys, stated that the final season will premiere in the first half of 2019. Considering it wasn’t until Summer 2017 that the seventh season premiered, this is a bit of a relief for fans.
The seventh season of Game of Thrones ended just as the wall crumbled and the army of White Walkers started heading south, complete with a dragon of their own. A massive war party was coming, and it was very unclear if the south would be ready for them. While Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen made peace with one another in part thanks to an understanding that they need each other to survive, Cersei Lannister looked as if she was preparing to betray everyone and take the entirety of the south for herself. The ending left fans wanting more, but fans didn’t know when it would return because at that point nothing had been filmed for the eighth and final season.
As far as what fans can expect from the season, that is unclear as HBO is still very tight lipped about their series. Bloys did say however that it was “pretty great.” Several of the cast have commented similar things as well, but there has been no word on who survives, and how everything falls into place.
HBO representatives also said the spinoff series will go into production in 2019. No cast or director have been hired as of yet though. The prequel is set to tell the story a thousand years before the story told in Game of Thrones. The logline for the show states “Only one thing is for sure: from the horrifying secrets of Westeros’s history to the true origin of the white walkers, the mysteries of the East to the Starks of legend … it’s not the story we think we know.”
