The final Game of Thrones season could arrive sooner than expected

Fans would be delighted with this.

Winter is here and we better enjoy it while it lasts. Cast your mind back to those barren, desolate and depressing months when we had no new episodes of Game of Thrones to look forward to. Christ, that period bleaker than enduring The Long Night beyond the Wall. Brace yourself because as Old Nan says in her tale : "Fear is for the winter, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides for years and children are born and live and die, all in darkness. That is the time for fear." Spoilers are coming. At the present moment, Jon Snow's patrol (get it?) are heading beyond the Wall as they do their very best to capture a wight and convince the Seven Kingdom's that their petty squabbling for the Iron Throne will ultimately mean nothing. Yep, they'll all be "ruling over a graveyard" unless the houses of Lannister, Stark, Targaryen etc can band together and fight the Night King. Whatever the outcome of the war may be, the ultimate fate of Westeros isn't going to be decided in the last two episodes of Season 7, but what about Season 8? Given the fact that the final season will only consist of six episodes, Thrones fans have been worried that they might not get as much dragon fire, death and bang for their buck. Fear not. We've already been teased by the idea that every episode in the final season might have a duration of a feature length film. HBO programming president Casey Bloys also added to this euphoria by saying "We haven't had that discussion yet because I don't know how long the episodes are going to be. Two hours per episode seems like it would be excessive, but it's a great show, so who knows?" Regarding the filming schedule for Season 8, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) has provided a brief insight. Speaking with Collider,  the Kingslayer himself has said that the final season is going into production in October 2017. "I don’t know what’s going to happen next season. We go back in October, so maybe in the next few weeks, we’ll get the scripts and I’ll find out. I’m very curious," he said. Throughout the history of making Game of Thrones , filming usually takes about 5 months to complete with four additional months required in post-production for VFX etc. Take a look at the rough schedule: Season 1: Started filming in July 26, 2010 and aired on April 17, 2011 - 9 months Season 2: Started filming in July 2011 and aired April 1st, 2012. - 9 months Season 3 : Started filming in July 2012 and aired on March 31, 2013 - 9 months (roughly) Season 4 : Started filming in July 2013 and aired on April 6th, 2014 - 9 months Season 5 : Started filming in July 2014 and aired on April 12th, 2015 - 9 months Season 6: Started filming in July 2015 and aired April 24th, 2016 - 9 months Season 7: Started filming in August 31st and aired on July 17th 2017 -  9 months (give or take) As you may know, Season 7 switched the filming schedule around because they wanted to accommodate the fact that winter has finally arrived in the show, but if we adhere to this schedule along with Coster-Waldau's statement, it's fair to assume that Season 8 of Game of Thrones will air in  July/August of 2018. Again, nothing official has been confirmed by HBO yet and it's very likely that the final season will take longer in post-production - those dragons are getting bigger - but this premiere date would definitely appeal to us. In a perfect world, the World Cup would just be over and then Game of Thrones would start. Fine by us.