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'Game of Thrones' showrunners: HBO drama will run for seven seasons

'Thrones' showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff recently said they're planning on seven seasons for the HBO fantasy drama.

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Keith Bernstein/HBO/AP
'Game of Thrones' stars Emilia Clarke.
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

Seven is often an important number in fantasy worlds, credited with being more magical or significant than other numbers.

And according to “Game of Thrones” showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, it’s the number of seasons the show will air in total. “Thrones” is debuting its fourth season on April 6. 

“It feels like this is the midpoint for us,” Benioff told Entertainment Weekly of the upcoming season. “If we’re going to go seven seasons, which is the plan, season 4 is right down the middle, the pivot point.”

Benioff noted that, like many other fantasy works, seven is a significant number in “Thrones” world as well.

“I would say it’s the goal we’ve had from the beginning,” he said of the seven seasons target. “It was our unstated goal, because to start on a show and say your goal is seven seasons is the height of lunacy. Once we got to the point where we felt like we’re going to be able to tell this tale to its conclusion, that became [an even clearer] goal. Seven gods, seven kingdoms, seven seasons. It feels right to us.”

“Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin has planned seven books in his Song of Ice and Fire series on which the TV series is based. He has so far released five of the novels, with the most recent, “A Dance with Dragons,” having come out in 2011. Martin’s sixth book, “The Winds of Winter,” will be the next book in the series.

The first two books in “Song” each took one season of the show, but Martin’s third book in the series, “A Storm of Swords,” has taken two seasons of “Thrones,” so it will be interesting to see how future books are divided for the show or if “Thrones” returns to its one-book-per-season pattern.

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