Winter is coming…next summer.
HBO today announced that Game of Thrones will kick off its seventh season during summer 2017. As expected, the network also confirmed that the next collection of stories from the Seven Kingdoms will be limited to seven episodes (noticing a trend here?).
In a statement, Casey Bloys, president, HBO programming said, “Now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing…Instead of the show”s traditional spring debut, we”re moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule.”
The shift from the normal April GoT kickoff to summertime was not unexpected. In a recent interview on the UFC Unfiltered podcast, Benioff and Weiss said that, due to weather-related concerns, shooting would be pushed.
“We”re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, ‘Winter is here” – and that means that sunny weather doesn”t really serve our purposes any more. So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot.”
In the interim, producers will just have to sit back and count their recent 23 Emmy nominations while fans wait impatiently.