How Many Episodes Will 'GoT' Season 8 Be?

While it might seem that the complex political machinations of Westeros will continue to unfold on our TVs forever, there are only a few more episodes of Game of Thrones left. While insiders have revealed some details about the upcoming season, how many episodes Game of Thrones' Season 8 will have remains murky. Jack Bender, who directed some of the past seasons' episodes, revealed in a June interview with Vanity Fair that the upcoming seventh season would be shortened from the usual ten to seven episodes.

Showrunner David Benioff confirmed that he had always intended to wrap up the series, rather than draw it out for as long as viewers were interested in watching. Here's what Benioff told Deadline at the end of June:

It’s two more seasons we’re talking about. From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70-75 hours, and that’s what we’ll end up with. Call it 73 for now...The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is, it’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to do something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We’re definitely heading into the end game now.

Since neither Benioff nor Bender addressed how long the eighth and final season will be, it looks like we'll have to do some math. Since the previous six seasons have been ten episodes long at around one hour an episode, there have been 60 total hours of Game of Thrones so far. Add the 7 hours from the upcoming shortened season and that's 67 hours. Subtracted from the projected 73 total hours, and we only have six hours of Game of Thrones left for the eighth season.

However, it's very possible that Season 8 will mimic its predecessor and contain seven episodes. After all, each episode is slightly less than an hour, so it might end up in the 73 hour range even with the full seven episodes. Regardless, we only have around 13 hours of Game of Thrones left. Sniffle. But look on the bright side: the fewer hours of Game of Thrones, the fewer deaths of remaining major characters. Or so I'd like to hope.

Image: HBO, Giphy