We've still got months – and we don't even know how many at this point – to wait for the next and final season of Game Of Thrones. But a new details have finally begun to emerge about the wrap-up for the giant fantasy epic that originally sprang from the brain-cave of George RR Martin. Thanks to Entertainment Weekly's new cover story, there's some fresh intel.
Among the new tidbits? The fact that the sets have been upgraded, the security is tighter than ever, and on the character front, we learn that Sophie Turner's Sansa is none to happy about her adopted brother Jon Snow's (Kit Harington) relationship with Emilia Clarke's Dany. And that might be before they learn that Dany is his aunt!
But with Season 7 ending as the Night King and his Army Of The Dead began their assault on Westeros in earnest, the new season (six episodes of varying, but mostly feature length) will aim to wrap things up. "It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death," co-executive producer Bryan Cogman tells the magazine. "It’s an incredibly emotional, haunting, bittersweet final season, and I think it honors very much what George set out to do – which is flipping this kind of story on its head." So big is the final season that the producers considered turning the season into three movies, an idea shot down by HBO, which instead offered around $15 million per episode to make them the biggest yet.
One thing that cash has been spent on (besides hair products for Harington) is the largest and most complicated battle the show (possibly any show) has ever brought to the screen. Original reports put the shoot for the huge scrap at more than twice the 25 days it took to complete the Battle Of The Bastards in Season 6, but in reality it was longer – 55 nights for the exterior work, then studio filming for weeks as director Miguel Sapochnik filled one episode with wall-to-wall action. "Having the largest battle doesn’t sound very exciting — it actually sounds pretty boring,” co-creator David Benioff tells EW. "Part of our challenge, and really, Miguel’s challenge, is how to keep that compelling... we’ve been building toward this since the very beginning, it’s the living against the dead, and you can’t do that in a 12-minute sequence." The result crosscuts between different characters in different parts of the battle, all with different challenges.
Still, one of the cast, does a much better job of hyping it up... "It’s brutal," Peter Dinklage says. "It makes the Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park."
Season 8 will be on screens at some point in 2019. For more from the report, head to EW's site, and check out our feature on the final season.
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