Tuesday 8 April 2014

Six Seasons and a Hodor: HBO renews GAME OF THRONES for TWO more seasons

HBO has renewed Game of Thrones for TWO more seasons, carrying the epic fantasy series forwards to a sixth year. Whilst a fifth season was pretty much a done deal, the news that the show would be renewed for two years at once - something HBO has never formally done before for one of its big-budget drama series - came as a surprise.


Season 4's debut episode Two Swords, aired to 6.64 million viewers for a first-run audience, setting a new record for the show (triple the figure that tuned in for the first episode three years ago). Including the repeats, more than 8 million people watched on the first night. Consolidated figures, including viewings on HBO Go and further repeats, are expected to take the show up to around 14 million, rivalling the best figures achieved by HBO's biggest domestic hit, The Sopranos (Game of Thrones is already, by a very wide margin, HBO's most popular show ever outside the USA).

The fifth season is expected to cover most or all of the fourth and fifth books of the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Season 6 will almost certainly carry the show into material from the as-yet-unpublished sixth novel, The Winds of Winter.

6 comments:

Ghost said...

I don't see how this two years renewal could come as a surprise to anyone. It's pretty much set that the whole series will end in 7 seasons.

Anonymous said...

2000 pages(4th and 5th books) in 10 episodes?Impossible...

Justin Pyle said...

So it takes them 20 episodes to cover Storm of Swords and they are going to cover twice that amount of book in 10 episodes? Have the show runners hinted that this is the case?

Adam Whitehead said...

ASoS will probably be more like 14-15 episodes, once you remove the original material not in the book and the segments dedicated to AFFC and ADWD that will appear this season.

There's also a difference between the physical size of the books and how much story will be adapted. I really enjoyed both AFFC and ADWD (even moreso on rereads) but there is a lot of material in them which can be edited out for the TV show. The TV show is probably going to focus a lot more on the original characters and keep new characters and material to a minimum.

Anonymous said...

What the hell is GRRM gonna do...? I'm worried.

Anonymous said...

All the (mostly useless IMO) Theon torture bits from S3 are straight out of book 5.

C.B.