Game of Thrones Season 7 Delay Confirmed—Winter Is Coming Next Summer

Season seven will also be seven episodes

By Chris Harnick Jul 18, 2016 4:20 PMTags
Game of ThronesHBO

There's new hope of relief from this sweltering summer: Winter is coming. But it's coming next summer. Game of Thrones is set to begin production on season seven this summer, but not premiere until the summer of 2017.

HBO announced production on the seven-episode seventh season will be based in Northern Ireland with portions filming in Spain and Iceland.

"Now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing," Carter Bloys, president of HBO programming, said in a statement. "Instead of the show's traditional spring debut, we're moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule."

Season seven directors Mark Mylod, Jeremy Podeswa, Matt Shakman and Alan Taylor.

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Game of Thrones co-creators Weiss and Benioff made headlines when they admitted that the season would likely be delayed. "We don't have an air date yet," Benioff and Weiss recently said. "We're starting a bit later because at the end of this season, 'Winter is here'—and that means that sunny weather doesn't really serve our purposes any more. So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot."

Game of Thrones picked up 23 Emmy nominations for the 2016 awards show. Among the honorees are Peter Dinklage, Kit Harington, Lena Headey, Maisie Williams and Emilia Clarke.

Can you survive the long fall, winter and spring knowing Game of Thrones will return for the summer?

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