Originally published March 12, 2019. Updated March 15, 2019.
With just over a month to go until the War for the Dawn gets underway, HBO has revealed the running times for the six episodes in the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones (via Winter is Coming):
Episode 801: 54 minutes – April 14th
Episode 802: 58 minutes – April 21st
Episode 803: 82 minutes – April 28th
Episode 804: 78 minutes – May 5th
Episode 805: 80 minutes – May 12th
Episode 806: 80 minutes – May 19th
As you can see above, the last two episodes both run for an hour and twenty minutes apiece – the same as the show’s longest episode to date, the season seven finale ‘The Dragon and the Wolf’, while episode three – assumed to be the big Battle of Winterfell – will take that record, running for an hour and twenty-two minutes.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, A Song of Ice and Fire creator George R.R. Martin has revealed that he doesn’t know exactly how the TV adaptation of his epic fantasy series will end, given that it has diverged from – and overtaken – the source material:
“I haven’t read the scripts [for the final season] and haven’t been able to visit the set because I’ve been working on The Winds of Winter,” states Martin. “I know some of the things. But there’s a lot of minor-character [arcs] they’ll be coming up with on their own. And, of course, they passed me several years ago. There may be important discrepancies.”
It will of course be some time before we find out what those “important discrepancies” may be, seeing as The Winds of Winter is still incomplete and without a release date, and the planned seventh and final novel A Dream of Spring… well, that’s going to be a while away yet…
