'Game of Thrones' Spinoffs Won't Premiere for at Least One Year After Final Season

By
HBO

If you’re expecting to see a Game of Thrones spinoff immediately after the end of the final season, don’t hold your breath.


Casey Bloys, HBO’s Head of Programming
, revealed to a handful of reporters on Wednesday at the summer Television Critics Association press tour that he doesn’t foresee any Game of Thrones offshoots for at least a year following the upcoming eighth and final season of the original series.


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“The No. 1 priority in all of this is the final season of Game of Thrones. I don’t want to do anything with the spinoff or anything that detracts or distracts from that. That season will happen. And my guess is it’ll be at least a year before you [see] anything else,” Bloys emphasized. “What I don’t want is that the attention to be drawn off the final season, which I think is going to be epic and amazing and have the distraction of a new Game of Thrones airing right after it. I think it’s best to separate it.”

There are currently four Game of Thrones spinoffs in development and Bloys confirmed that none of them will center on any characters in the original series.

“I haven’t seen anything yet. With a show like Game of Thrones, with the level of quality that they’ve set, we’d be lucky to get one that hits and we’re hopeful. We’ll see,” Bloys said of creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff’s vision.


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As for timing of those spinoffs, it would rely heavily on when the six-episode final season of Game of Thrones will end up premiering. Bloys hinted that there’s a chance it may not be until 2019 that the farewell season comes to HBO.

“The scripts are written and they’re boarding it all out,” he said. “It’s a big season. I don’t have the answer yet, but they’re working on it.”

In regards to the length of the final episodes, Bloys offered this update: “They’ve talked about the length. I imagine they will be longer, but I truly don’t [know]. Like, ‘Oh they’re going to be 80 minutes,’ I truly don’t know.”


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When presented with the idea of a feature-length episode every week, the HBO programming head seemed to shoot that idea down.

“We haven’t had that discussion yet, because I don’t know how long the episodes are going to be. Two hours an episode seems to me like it would be excessive, but it’s a great show, so who knows,” he said.


Game of Thrones
airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.

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