'Game of Thrones' Showrunners dismiss spin-off talk
Plenty of news is swirling with the impending end of Game of Thrones (which is still probably two years away, but it'll be a quick two years.) Now, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are dismissing spin-off rumours in the wake of hinting at shortened final seasons for the show.
“I know that [HBO programming president] Mike [Lombardo] made off-the-cuff comments to that effect,” says Weiss. (Lombardo told reporters at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in January that “there’s enormous possibility to be mined” in a prequel.)
“When we sat down with him and told him, ‘This is what we see, this is how many hours of viable story we have left to tell the story we set out to tell,’ there wasn’t a second of pushback on that,” Weiss insists. “They were concerned with making the best show they can because they know that’s the show that’s going to stick around for the longest.”
Weiss added that concern over keeping the show engaging is one HBO totally understands. “At a certain point, especially if it’s a serialized story, it falls apart and loses its heat and its momentum because there’s a carrying capacity even a world the size of ours has,” he points out. “When you reach that carrying capacity and you try to push it further, people start to wonder when this is going to be over and hope that it will be over soon so they can move onto the next thing. That’s not what we ever wanted.”
Lombardo also now dismisses spin-off suggestions. “That’s never the way we’ve done our best work,” he says. “I can’t imagine, if it were not driven by them, that that would happen.”
Source: Variety
