HBO Dropped an Annoyingly Vague Hint About the Return of ‘Game of Thrones’
Game of Thrones may have finished filming its eighth and final season earlier this month, 55-day battle scenes and all, but there’s still no official word on when fans will actually get to see it. All we’ve known up until now about a potential release date for the six-episode season (yes, this one’s only six episodes for some reason) is that it’s coming sometime “in 2019.”
But on Wednesday, fans eager to finally see Jon Snow fuck up the Night King or whatever finally got their first big hint. During an event for the Television Critics Association, the gracious overlords at HBO appeased GoT viewers hanging on every shred of news about the highly-anticipated new season by slicing the massive, year-long release window down to a paltry six months.
HBO president of programming Casey Bloys confirmed that the final season will hit the network in the “first half” of 2019, Entertainment Weekly reports. So that means that the new season could drop during spring or summer, in one of six months, on one of the first 181 days of 2019. Wonderful.
For the record, most of the earlier seasons of GoT have all dropped in March or April, so it is likely that this last season would follow suit, too. Also, back in January, Metro UK reported that Maisie Williams said in an interview that season eight was set to drop April 2019, but she later tweeted that the quote was bullshit. Maybe that release date is real after all, and she was just trying to backtrack after letting some actual information slip?
This is, unfortunately, just speculation. For the time being, all we know is that at some point between January and June 2019, we’ll finally get to see the fate of Westeros. It could be in six months, or eight months, or nine—but at least it’s coming.
In the meantime, the other show based on a George R.R. Martin book, Nightflyers, is due out this fall, but the freaky space horror series isn’t exactly going to fill the gaping, dragon-sized hole that Game of Thrones will presumably leave in its fans’ hearts. Good thing then that HBO is developing a shit-ton of spinoffs once the show’s off the air, including a prequel series about a very bleak time in Westeros history. According to Bloys, that show is set to go into production in “early 2019,” whatever that means.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.