Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen and Kit Harington as Jon Snow (Image: HBO/Helen Sloan)
HBO is employing a common tactic to avoid having even their own actors get inside information on the series: multiple endings.
“I know in ‘Game of Thrones,’ the ending, they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that nobody really know what happens,” said HBO president of programming Casey Bloys while speaking at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reports The Morning Call.
“Finales are tough,” the executive said while speaking to students and faculty.
“If you think about, ‘Six Feet Under,’ well that was a pretty good finale,” he shared about the HBO comedy-drama which followed a family operating a funeral home.
“But if you think about ‘Seinfeld,’ if you think about ‘The Sopranos,’ if you think about ‘Breaking Bad.’ Everybody has an opinion about how a show should end,” he said.
Both “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” also had alternate endings to keep the series’ finale a surprise.
“You have to do that on a long show. Because when you’re shooting something, people know. So they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that there’s no real definitive answer until the end,” explained Bloys.
Other ploys to avoid spoilers include shooting fake scenes, actor Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow admitted in a July “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” interview.
Production for the eighth and final season will begin in October, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The show has drawn an average of 30 million viewers per episode, according to Bloys. However, even more have been watching illegally, with a total of 1 billion viewers in the seventh season, reports tech company MUSOC. Niña V. Guno /ra
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