‘Game of Thrones’ News: Series May Live Beyond Its Eighth Season Through Spin-off

Game of Thrones, the hit HBO series and recipient of 38 Emmy Awards, is scheduled to air its seventh and penultimate season in the summer of 2017. Season 7 will consist of seven episodes, while Season 8, the show’s final season, is supposed to have six episodes. HBO, however, hopes that showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff will extend the eighth season to more than the planned six episodes.

This proposed extension, however, isn’t HBO’s only tactic of trying to prolong the series’s life. HBO is also considering a Game of Thrones spinoff, something the network had never offered before. Though nothing has been made official yet, HBO’s programming president Casey Bloys gave a promising update at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour.

“All I can say is that we’re exploring it… It’s a big enough property that we would be foolish not to explore it,” Bloys revealed to Variety. “It’s a really rich world. We’d be foolish not to look at it.”

And the world of Game of Thrones is a rich one indeed. The series is based on the fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, and in addition to the main set, Martin had also released a bundle of prequel novellas. Three of the books follow the same protagonists — Dunk and Egg — and are sectioned into the volume titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

What’s more, Martin has also written an entire history book for the fantasy world, titled The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones. The author also has plans for another history book to be titled Blood and Fire, which would cover the entire history of House Targaryen. There are also two more books Martin has yet to finish writing for the series A Song of Ice and Fire, titled The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. 

This plethora of written material should provide ample inspiration for more storylines in the proposed spinoff. Fans of the series can anticipate celebrating the series’s hopeful revival.