Game of Thrones Season 7 Is Going to Be Much, Much Longer Than We Thought
By Joanna Robinson. Photos: Courtesy of HBO.
Game of Thrones fans already grappling with the despair of the imminent end of the HBO series were even more disheartened to learn, officially, last summer that the upcoming seventh season would be shorter than usual. Instead of 10 episodes, HBO would only be airing seven in 2017. And hopes that those fewer episodes would at least be long ones were dashed when Entertainment Weekly reported that “the remaining episodes are not, for the most part, longer.” Now, though, it looks like those little birds were misinformed. Though Season 7 episode lengths may, in the end, shift a little between now and their air date, HBO.com has revealed massively super-size, record-breakingly long episodes on its schedule.
Here is the breakdown, via Watchers on the Wall, of the official runtimes on HBO.com:
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Episode 1: 59 minutes. Episode 2: 59 minutes. Episode 3: 63 minutes. Episode 4: 50 minutes. Episode 5: 59 minutes. Episode 6: 71 minutes. Episode 7: 81 minutes.
Though you may be used to thinking of Game of Thrones as an hour-long show, the average running times over the course of seven seasons have actually stayed in the 54:25-56:08 range, Watchers reports. The site also points out that the previous record-holder for longest episode ever was last year’s action-packed finale, “The Winds of Winter,” which came in at 68 minutes. Those extra minutes last year allowed for the show to take its time with a stunning, mood-setting opener set to Ramin Djawadi’s haunting track “Light of the Seven.” But Season 7, Episode 6 will outpace even last year’s finale, and this year’s finale will have 13 more juicy minutes to play with. In the context of Game of Thrones, that’s a lifetime.
The total runtime of Season 7 is, Watchers tabulates, 7 hours 20 minutes. Compared wit the usual 9 hours 15 minutes of a 10-episode season, that may still seem spare. But it’s essentially eight episodes worth of time stuffed into a seven-episode package.
As for the shortest installment of the bunch, Episode 4, which marks the Game of Thrones directing debut of Matt Shakman—who will also direct the slightly longer Episode 5. Shakman cut his teeth on half-hour comedies, so it made sense that his episodes might be sparer. They’ll serve as nice transitions into the almost feature-length final two directed by Alan Taylor (“Baelor,” “Fire and Blood,” Thor: The Dark World) and Jeremy Podeswa (“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” “The Red Woman”).
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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