HBO Plans to Shoot Multiple Finales for Game of Thrones

By Cori Burcham | September 21, 2017

With the ongoing risk of leaks, HBO has decided to take preventative measures to

ensure the finale of HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones will not be spoiled for fans before it airs. After being the victim of leaks this summer, HBO plans to shoot multiple finales so if leaks do occur, no one will know which ending is the correct one.

According to HBO’s President of Programming, Casey Bloys, the actors who star in Game of Thrones will also be kept in the dark and won’t know how the series will end. “I know in Game of Thrones, the ending, they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that nobody really knows what happens. You have to do that on a long show. When you’re shooting, people know,” said Bloys in a speech at Moravian College. “So they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that there’s no real definitive answer until the end.”

HBO experienced a few leaks this summer when airing the seventh season. Scripts from Game of Thrones as well as other HBO documents were leaked by hackers. One episode was accidentally aired out of order in Europe, which was then shared on the internet. According to the piracy tracking company Muso, Game of Throne’s seventh season was illegally downloaded “more than a billion times.”

The co-creator of Game of Thrones, David Benioff, talked with Entertainment Weekly back in June about the hardship of keeping plot details secret. “Even the CIA and NSA are unable to prevent leaks,” said Benioff. “It’s incredibly hard for anybody with a show of this size, with so many people working on it, and all you need is one person— and it’s not necessarily a bad egg among the crew members. The leak can be a relative or roommate to somebody with access to the scripts who decides to try and get a few Facebook friends.”

Benioff continued by stating, “It becomes harder every year as the show and the viewership expands. Thankfully, there are so many false rumors— which makes us happy, because it becomes harder for people to know what’s real and what’s not real. We will do everything we can to keep [leaks] from happening.”

Not only is it a challenge to keep the details of a show as big as Game of Thrones secret, but the pressure is on to provide an ending that will keep 10 millions viewers happy. “Finales are tough,” said Bloys. “If you think about Six Feet Under, well that was a pretty good finale. But if you think about Seinfeld, if you think about The Sopranos, if you think about Breaking Bad— everybody has an opinion about how a show should end.”

The premiere date for the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones has not been announced yet. According to Casey Bloys, the production for season 8 is tentatively underway. “Our production people are trying to figure out a timeline for the shoot and how much time the special effects take,” said Bloys.

The Hollywood Reporter says that the production of the last season, which will only have six episodes, will begin in October of this year and will possibly finish in mid-2018. That means fans will be forced to wait as long as 2019 to see an epic White Walker vs. Westeros battle. Winter may be here, but we’ll have to wait for season 8.

[Originally published on Styleft.com in September 2017]

https://styleft.com/hbo-plans-to-shoot-multiple-finales-for-game-of-thrones/