Essays · TV

Game of Thrones Season 7: Later Start, Shorter Season Confirmed

By  · Published on July 18th, 2016

Summer is The New Spring for Game of Thrones

HBO just confirmed some things about its next season.

In the event that you haven’t been following the offseason Game of Thrones news closely, this might come as a surprise. For some, it’s simple confirmation of what we already expected. HBO confirmed today that Thrones season 7 will not debut until summer 2017, rather than its usual starting spot in late spring (usually April). It has also confirmed that the season will be shortened to seven episodes, rather than the usual ten.

“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.” said HBO’s president of programming Casey Bloys in a statement.

This news lines up with previous rumors – that the show only has about 13 hours of story left to tell and that they need to be shooting later in the year because of weather considerations. And while it means that fans will wait longer for the debut of the next season, it also stretches out the season of speculation. That should be fun.

The other big news is that next season will be shot in Northern Ireland, Spain, and Iceland. Iceland is a location that has primarily been used for scenes north of The Wall, where large landscape shots of glaciers and snow-covered mountains are needed. With the show’s storylines becoming constricted, it’s not surprising that they will need fewer locations (and more with snow). This means that we’ll be getting a lot of King’s Landing/Oldtown/Dorne from Spain, The North/Riverlands/Iron Islands from Northern Ireland, and the far North from Iceland.

As of now, there’s nothing particularly revelatory about this news. Though as the fall creeps up and production begins, there will undoubtedly be plenty to discuss, so stay tuned.

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Neil Miller is the persistently-bearded Publisher of Film School Rejects, Nonfics, and One Perfect Shot. He's also the Executive Producer of the One Perfect Shot TV show (currently streaming on HBO Max) and the co-host of Trial By Content on The Ringer Podcast Network. He can be found on Twitter here: @rejects (He/Him)