The future of “Game of Thrones” is in the prequels, and according to an HBO executive, that may not include the current showrunners
Entertainment Weekly spoke with HBO programming president Casey Bloys about “Game of Thrones’” future, which includes whether or not showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss will be involved with the prequels.
According to Bloys, Benioff and Weiss want to enjoy the prequels as fans, since they’ve been on the “Game of Thrones” beat for the past 12 years.
“In conversations with them, they feel if their name is on the prequels — even in a passive way — it conveys some sort of expectation or responsibility,” he said. “They want to enjoy the show as fans and don’t want to worry about the scripts or production issues. We were hoping to have their names on it out of respect for them, but we understand why they don’t want that.”
The current plan is to wrap up the main show — which is set to end next season — and then continue on with potentially four prequels, although Bloys clarifies that HBO doesn’t plan on putting them all out one after the other.
Currently the plan isn’t even to focus on the four prequels, but rather to finish the current show and create another good one.
“I wanted to make sure fans know this is a really embryonic process,” Bloys said. “I haven’t even seen outlines. In the press at large, everybody said, ‘there are four spinoffs’ and they assume that means each one is happening and we’re going to have a new ‘Game of Thrones’ show per quarter. That’s not what’s going on.”
In order to wrap up the current show, which is set to go into Season 7 in July, Bloys said HBO is giving Benioff and Weiss a flexible amount of time to complete it.
So no word on when we’re to expect Season 8, but it could be longer than the usual year between seasons.
“They have to write the episodes and figure out the production schedule. We’ll have a better sense of that once they get further into the writing,” Bloys added.
Check out the full interview here.