The Original Plan For The GAME OF THRONES Series Finale Was a Six-Hour Movie Trilogy
It’s hard to believe that Game of Thrones is finally going to come to an end next year. Fans will be treated to six final episodes and those will include one of the most epic battles ever created for TV or film.
We have no idea how it’s going to end, but I imagine that many of our favorite characters won’t come out of battle alive. The corpses are going to be piled high this next season and it’s going to be sad.
It turns out that there was a chance we might have seen this Game of Thrones finale play out over the course of a trilogy of films on the big screen! EW talks about what showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were looking at doing:
So the producers had an idea: The final season could be six hours long and released as three movies in theaters — just like Martin’s best-known influence, The Lord of the Rings. It’s not that the duo wanted to make movies per se, but it seemed like the only way to get the time and money needed to pull off their finale. ‘It’s what we’re working towards in a perfect world,’ Weiss said. ‘We end up with an epic fantasy story but with the level of familiarity and investment in the characters that are normally impossible in a two-hour movie.'”
Obviously, that’s not the direction they ended up going, but I actually would have preferred that! I would have loved to see the Game of Thrones finale play out on the big screen, especially with that monstrous battle sequence that’s been teased! But, HBO anted to keep it on HBO:
The flaw in this plan was that HBO is about serving its subscribers, not taking gambles at the box office. Behind the scenes, the network brass gently shot down the movie idea. But executives assured Benioff and Weiss that they would eventually have everything they needed to make a final season that was “a summer tentpole-size spectacle.”
In the end, Benioff and Weiss were given everything they needed to deliver the best possible epic conclusion to the George R.R. Martin fantasy series that we’ve all been waiting for. As much as I would have loved to see the finale on the big screen, I’ll be happy watching it in the comfort of my own home as well. I’ll just use it as an excuse to get a bigger TV!
Would you have liked to watch the Game of Thrones finale as a trilogy of films on the big screen?
Game of Thrones season 8 is set to premiere in 2019.