Game of Thrones’ George R.R. Martin Reveals Series Was Supposed to End With Three Films

Game of Thrones‘ final season raised a lot of eyebrows when it got announced and now fans might have a better reason why the last six episodes felt a little bit different. Series creator George R.R. Martin told Welt that the plan for the ending was to have it play out over three movies. This would have dramatically altered the scope of the final chapters and become a giant event. Imagining that many people clustered together to see the end with any sort of wait on their hands would have been colossal. Even still, it turns out that it wasn’t meant to be due to some decisions made by the people higher up the totem pole at HBO. Game of Thrones was a television show in this incarnation and they didn’t want to branch out in such a dramatic way.

Martin explains in a translation by deepL on Reddit, “Because HBO didn’t want that. The executives said: We produce tv shows, we are not in the cinema business. And if HBO does make a movie, like the movie based on “Deadwood”, they only produce it to show it on tv – not on the big screen. Everything is changing at the moment. What is being shown at the cinema right now? Everything is mixing up. Nowadays we don’t know where the lines between cinema, streaming services and television are.”

So, that’s something for Game of Thrones fans to wrap their heads around as they get ready for the spinoff series and those two books that will emerge at some point. Still, it must be super jarring to hear about the plans for theaters being scuttled. Who knows how the ending would have differed as a result of these changes. As with everything surrounding the property at this point, speculation is king.

Over the weekend at the SAG Awards, one of the show’s star defended the final season one the red carpet. Pilou Asbæk called the last salvo of episodes perfect and explained his reasoning. “When we had the read-through… we ended up doing a standing ovation for 15, 20 minutes. It was a perfect ending,” Asbæk explained. “But people were upset because an era finished.” The debate will likely rage one, but one thing is for certain, the entire situation appears to have been fluid at this point. That might make the entire run to the end even more of a sore spot for longtime fans.