Season 8 of Game of Thrones is almost upon us and whilst we have heard various rumoured runtimes for Season 8, as yet we had received no official confirmation of this. Well, it seems like those rumored run times were guesstimates at best as HBO have officially revealed the run times for the first 2 episodes on their schedule.

The rumored run times were as follows:

Episode 1: 60 minutes

Episode 2: 60 minutes

Episode 3: 80 minutes

Episode 4: 80 minutes

Episode 5: 80 minutes

Episode 6: 80 minutes

Now initially I felt this could not be right as I have never seen any Game of Thrones season yet have such tight runtimes rounded up like that. It turns out I was right as going by HBO’s schedule we have the following times for the final six episodes:

Episode 1: 54 minutes – April 14

Episode 2: 58 minutes – April 21

Episode 3: 60 minutes – April 28

Episode 4: 78 minutes – May 5

Episode 5: 80 minutes – May 12

Episode 6: 80 minutes – May 19

Many fans are already discussing these run times with a bit of negativity as it seemed like the episodes may be even longer based on previous comments and rumors. The general feeling is that the run time of the entire season is not enough to possibly get through all the content which needs to feature in this final season of the show.

Thing is, we must remember that Thrones is on HBO, which means no advertisement breaks. If we compare this to most shows on network TV, then the first two episodes are comparable to an hour-long show with no ad-breaks. If we compare to a Netflix show for example, then we can also see even those first 2 episodes are extended from the normal hour-long series we see.

Overall we are still looking at a final season which will run to 410 minutes continuously (the titles aside). That’s 2 full-length movies if you look at it that way and I am sure that length of time is all they needed or they would have taken more time to tell the story. I’m pretty sure HBO never put any kind of limitations on how long episodes should be and we have actually had a longer episode already in Season 7. I guess I am saying fans shouldn’t start being negative about not enough time, until we see the show and judge the finale for ourselves.

Is this enough time to finish the story of Game of Thrones? Share any thoughts you have in the usual place below as always, April 14 Winter is coming.

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SOURCE: HBO

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