As Game of Thrones gears up for its fifth season next month, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo has been speaking to Entertainment Weekly about the epic fantasy series, admitting that he’d love to extend the show beyond the seven season preference of showrunners David Benoiff and D.B. Weiss:
“We started this journey with David and Dan. It’s their vision. Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely. We’ll have an honest conversation that explores all possible avenues. If they weren’t comfortable going beyond seven seasons, I trust them implicitly and trust that’s the right decision—as horrifying as that is to me. What I’m not going to do is have a show continue past where the creators believe where they feel they’ve finished with the story.”
As for talk of a possible Game of Thrones movie, Lombardo appeared to all but rule this out as a possibility: “Certainly there have been conversations where it’s been said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do that?’ But when you start a series with our subscribers, the promise is that for your HBO fee that we’re going to take you to the end of this. I feel that on some level [a movie would be] changing the rules: Now you have to pay $16 to see how your show ends.”
Responding to Lombardo’s comments, A Song of Ice and Fire creator George R.R. Martin posted on his official LiveJournal that: “I do know that David & Dan have stated in interviews that they see the show winding up in seven seasons … I also know that HBO wants the series to run longer than that. I have known that since the very beginning… well, actually, since the day after the second episode of season one aired, when I had lunch with one of HBO’s top execs, who told me, ‘We want this to run ten years.’ I allowed that ten years sounded fine to me. I continue to hear similar sentiments from HBO every time I have meeting with them, be it in L.A. or New York.”
And as for HBO seemingly dismissing a movie, Martin added: “I see that this new crop of stories also raises, once again, the notion of concluding the series with one or more feature films. And in some of these stories, once again, this idea is wrongly attributed to me. Let me state, yet again, that while I love this idea, it did NOT originate with me. It was a notion suggested to me, which I have enthusiastically endorsed. Sure, I love the idea. Why not? What fantasist would not love the idea of going out with an epic hundred million feature film? And the recent success of the Imax experience shows that the audience is there for such a movie. If we build it, they will come. But will we build it? I have no bloody idea.”
Would you like to see Game of Thrones running for ten seasons (or more), and how do you feel about a potential movie? Let us know your thoughts…
Game of Thrones returns to HBO on April 12th. Follow all of our coverage here.
Originally published March 14, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
