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Cable channel HBO said on Thursday that "Game
of Thrones" would return in 2019 for a six-episode final season.
It did not specify the month.
The series is HBO's biggest hit ever with some 30 million
viewers in the United States alone and an army of devoted fans
worldwide.
The final season of the Emmy Award-winning show is expected to
reveal which of the warring families in the fictional Seven
Kingdoms of Westeros will win the multigenerational struggle for
control of the Iron Throne.
Production on the final season started in October, and filming
is expected to last until mid-2018. HBO's head of programming,
Casey Bloys, has said multiple endings will be filmed to avoid
leaks or hacks of how the saga ends.
Show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss told Entertainment
Weekly in 2016 that they wanted to make the series finale as
spectacular as possible. HBO said on Thursday that Benioff and
Weiss will also direct the final season.
The seventh season ended last August with an average of more
than 30 million U.S. viewers per episode across multiple
platforms. Some of its seven episodes were more than an hour
long.
The long gap until the final season would give author George
R.R. Martin the chance to finish one or two new "Game of
Thrones" books that he said in July he was working on. The
television series has already advanced beyond the events of
Martin's five published "A Song of Ice and Fire" series of
novels.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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