Director Jack Bender Says GAME OF THRONES Will Only Have Seven Episodes Next Season

As a huge fan of both Lost and Game of Thrones, I was excited to see director Jack Bender at the helm of the past two episodes of GoT. He gave us that terrific Hodor sequence, as well as the return of a long-lost member of the Stark family (I'm trying to be vague so I don't spoil anything), and he's also the guy responsible for one of the very best episodes of Lost, the time-travel heavy Desmond episode "The Constant." (He's also responsible for another of the show's most heart-wrenching moments: when Vincent the dog swims after Walt at the end of season one.)

Bender spoke with Vanity Fair about his work on Thrones, and while the whole interview is absolutely worth reading, he dropped some particularly interesting information in this section:

Are you coming back next season?

I don't know the answer to that. They're only doing 7 [episodes], and they've got their regulars who have done it forever. I know that I had a wonderful experience doing the show and I know that Dan and David are thrilled with the shows, but I've got this series I'm mounting for the beginning of 2017 based on Stephen King's trilogy of books starting with Mr. Mercedes. Brendan Gleeson is playing the lead, which I'm thrilled about, Anton Yelchin, and I'm in the process of mounting that. I haven't been asked yet and I also don't know what their schedule is going to be. But under the best of circumstances, schedule and everything, I had a great experience doing the show. If available and they wanted me to, I would love to do that.

I'm pretty sure that's the first time anyone has given a specific number of episodes for the next season of the show, and it's fitting that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss would do seven episodes considering their initial plan was to do seven seasons of the show to honor the seven gods, seven kingdoms, and seven books. They later updated their plan to include 70-75 hours of total content for the whole series, leaving fans wondering how exactly the final episodes would be split into two seasons. If Bender's statement is true, we can guess they're looking at seven episodes for each of the final two seasons, coming in at a total of 74 hours of Game of Thrones.

We'll have to wait for HBO to officially confirm this number, but either way, it's good to have a better idea of exactly how many episodes are left since we're currently blasting through the sixth season and it's nice to know where we are in the overall arc of the series.