Game of Thrones Season 8 Official Trailer Released

[Koby]

The HBO drama’s final season is the biggest show on the planet, spending 10 months filming just six episodes for its climactic season 8. Expectations are incredibly high.

 

“The fans will not be let down,” says director David Nutter. “There are a lot of firsts in these episodes. There’s the funniest sequence I’ve ever shot on this show, the most emotional and compelling scene I’ve ever shot, and there’s one scene where there’s so many [major characters] together it feels like you’re watching a superhero movie.”

 

One specific episode is expected to be the longest consecutive battle sequence ever committed to film, and brings the largest number of GoT major characters together since the show’s debut episode in 2011 (“You can’t have this many actors on set, there are too many egos!” jokes Harington).

 

For Williams, the episode marks Arya’s first Game of Thrones battle, an irony that isn’t lost on her. “I skip the battle every year, which is bizarre since Arya’s the one who’s been training the most,” she says. “This is my first taste of it. And I’ve been thrown in at the deep end.”

 

When preparing for the shoot, Sapochnik tried to find a longer battle sequence in cinema history and couldn’t. The closest was the nearly 40-minute Helm’s Deep siege in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which he studied to determine when the audience would get “battle fatigue” from too much hacking and slashing. “It feels like the only way to really approach it properly is take every sequence and ask yourself: ‘Why would I care to keep watching?’” says the British director between takes. “One thing I found is the less action — the less fighting — you can have in a sequence, the better.”

 

“We want people to love it,” Weiss says. “It matters a lot to us. “We’ve spent 11 years doing this. We also know no matter what we do, even if it’s the optimal version, that a certain number of people will hate the best of all possible versions. There is no version where everybody says, ‘I have to admit, I agree with every other person on the planet that this is the perfect way to do this’ — that’s an impossible reality that doesn’t exist. I’m hoping for the Breaking Bad [finale] argument where it’s like, ‘Is that an A or an A+?’”

 

Adds Benioff: “From the beginning we’ve talked about how the show would end. A good story isn’t a good story if you have a bad ending. Of course we worry.”

 

The finale will air May 19. Tens of millions of fans around the world will tune in to see which characters perish, which survive (if any) and who sits on the Iron Throne (if anyone). And then we’ll enter a post-Game of Thrones world, with all our watches having ended.

 

Benioff is pretty blunt about his finale viewing plans. “I plan to be very drunk,” he says, “and very far from the internet.”

 

 

[dealvidit]

Boy oh boy! Arya FTW!

[Duckgoose]

It's about time! I love this show, but damn some of them are not aging well. We need to see the spin-offs starting this year too.

[Koby]

2 hours ago, Duckgoose said:

It's about time! I love this show, but damn some of them are not aging well. We need to see the spin-offs starting this year too.

Only one of the proposed spin-offs is currently actually green-lit and it only begins filming later this year. So it definitely won't be airing in 2019.

 

On June 8, 2018, HBO commissioned a pilot to a Game of Thrones prequel series from Goldman as showrunner and Martin as co-creator. Regarding the other four projects, HBO president of programming Casey Bloys said that some of them have been abandoned completely, while some remain as possibilities for the future. The accepted prequel will take place in the Age of Heroes, a period that begins roughly 10,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones. Notable events of that period include the foundation of powerful Houses, the Long Night when the White Walkers first descended upon Westeros, and the Andal Invasion when the Andals invaded from Essos and conquered most of Westeros. Writing in a blog post in June 2018, Martin suggested "The Long Night" as a title for the upcoming series.

 

S. J. Clarkson will direct and executive produce the pilot, which is scheduled to begin filming in mid-2019 in Northern Ireland and other locations. Naomi Watts has been cast as the female lead, playing "a charismatic socialite hiding a dark secret." Josh Whitehouse was the second actor to join the cast, followed by Toby Regbo, Ivanno Jeremiah, Georgie Henley, Naomi Ackie, Denise Gough, Jamie Campbell Bower, Sheila Atim and Alex Sharp, who have been cast as series regulars.