Game of Thrones: Could season 8 be delayed as well?

Game of Thrones has always had a season once a year, but a new interview with HBO’s Casey Bloys suggests that might not be the case.

Even though Game of Thrones has a delay and has only seven episodes this year, the extra wait of a few months doesn’t feel quite so long anymore, especially since we’re now just over a month away anyway.

However, the wait might be a little longer for the actual final season of the show. Entertainment Weekly spoke to Casey Bloys, HBO’s president of programming. Here’s Bloys’ answer to a question about 2019 also being a possible airdate for the final season:

"Yeah. They [David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the Thrones showrunners] 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."

Now, there are a couple ways that this could play out. First, Game of Thrones could follow the Westworld plan and just take an entire year off the air. Even though Thrones has a far more established fanbase, this extra time could let things rise to a fever pitch and result in even more attention to the show when it does return. Remember, watching ice melt was an actual marketing tactic used this year for season 7. After an extra year of not knowing what happens, that’ll seem even more reasonable. (It could also backfire and lead to frustrated fans.)

Second, the question EW asked had the words “and/or”. That is, “2018 and/or 2019” was how reporter James Hibberd asked. For a show that emphasizes winter so much, why not capitalize on the season and air season 8 starting in December of 2018? I want to take a moment and emphasize that that’s pure speculation — but it does have some strange logic to it. As Bloys stated, he himself doesn’t have an actual idea of when season 8 will air. But if the problem ends up being about extra production time, that’s a few more months to get everything together.

That would also give the prequels more time to germinate as well. Bloys emphasized that the plan isn’t to rush the prequel out the door after season 8, saying that “you’re not going to see anything air anytime close to the season 8 finale.”

Next: 15 awesome Game of Thrones theories

For now, the focus should be on season 7, since it’s dropping in July. But it doesn’t hurt to start preparing for other delays now.