HBO is set to air "Game of Thrones" Season 7 in the summer of 2017. Season 7 will serve as the penultimate season of the series and will consist of seven episodes. Currently, showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff are hoping to extend the next and final season to more than just six episodes.
Aside from extending Season 8 to more than the proposed six episodes, HBO is also considering another method to keep the franchise alive. According to Comicbook, the network is currently considering a "Game of Thrones" spinoff, which is something that HBO has never done with any of its previous franchises.
While HBO has not yet confirmed the spinoff, HBO's president of programming, Casey Bloys, recently shared some updates on where the series stands. At the Television Critics' Association's (TCA) winter press tour, Bloys said, "All I can say is that we're exploring it. We don't have any scripts, we're not even close to saying 'Oh let's do this.' But it's a big enough property that we would be foolish not to explore it."
In his interview with Variety, the HBO executive said the world of "Game of Thrones" is a rich world and it would be foolish to not look at it. According to him, there is no certainty yet that a spinoff will come to fruition, but "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin has plenty of source materials available in case they finally decide to explore prequels and other story threads.
Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" novel series is the basis for the plot of the "Game of Thrones" television series. In addition to the novels that make up the said series, he has also previously released other prequel novellas, three of which following the same pair of protagonists, Dunk and Egg. The three novellas have been compiled in "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," while the massive history of the "Game of Thrones" world is collected in "The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones."
"Game of Thrones" Season 7 returns to HBO in summer. Watch the Season 7 promo here: