After Game of Thrones season six came to a thrilling end last month, fans have been left on tenterhooks ahead of the debut of the seventh. And it looks like the annual nine-month wait may well be longer than usual, with the creators of the HBO fantasy series saying they expect to encounter some delays in the filming – and all because of the weather.
As the show has long threatened, the arrival of winter in the world of Westeros and beyond has thrown a spanner in the works of the Game of Thrones filming schedule. Showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, two Americans who met each other while completing postgraduate degrees at Dublin’s Trinity College, said that a delayed start to filming is a very real possibility while appearing on the UFC Unfiltered podcast.
While being interviewed on their love of mixed martial arts, the pair was asked when we can expect the penultimate season of the show to start. While previous seasons have all premiered on HBO in the month of April, Benioff and Weiss said the seventh could be delayed because of summertime. With filming requiring dark and miserable weather, the production schedule is likely to be delayed in order to allow the seasons become more “grim.”
“We’re starting a little bit later, because at the end of this season, you know, ‘Winter is here,’” Benioff said on the podcast. “And that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes anymore, so we kind of pushed everything down the line so we could get some grim, grey weather, even in the sunnier places where we shoot.”
HBO has yet to confirm whether or not Game of Thrones seventh season will be delayed, but has said that it is “too early to speculate” on which date the show will premiere in 2017. Benioff and Weiss already admitted that the final two seasons of the show will likely feature fewer episodes, estimating that they have between 13 and 15 episodes of the story left to unfold.
