In case you were hoping that from now until then that the folks at HBO or the show’s creators might change their mind, you’ll be disappointed to learn that the final season’s six episodes have been confirmed by showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss during a speaker panel at SXSW as reported by Entertainment Weekly.
According to Benioff, “It’s only going to be six episodes for the final season. From the beginning we’ve wanted to tell a 70-hour movie. It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it’s stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle and now we’re coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way, I’m very happy we’ve kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to.”
HBO themselves have yet to confirm the final episode count for season 8, but like we said the showrunners are already pretty set that they will want to end it in 6 episodes, so don’t expect that to change. In the meantime season 7 of Game of Thrones has been confirmed to air on the 16th of July, 2017.