HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ Will Spoil the Final Two Books

This has got to be a first, a moment where the question “What was better, the movie (or in this case, television show) or the book?” will find the story first being told as adapted for the screen rather than originating on the page. “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss confirmed at the Oxford Union (via Moviefone) that the television series will undoubtedly spoil the books as author George R.R. Martin‘s sixth book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” franchise, “The Winds of Winter“, is nowhere in sight and the series will soon overtake what’s already on the page.

Benioff told the audience the following in the video, which you can watch at the bottom of this post:

Luckily, we’ve been talking about this with George for a long time, ever since we saw this could happen, and we know where things are heading. So we’ll eventually basically meet up at pretty much the same place where George is going [in Book 7, A Dream of Spring]. There might be a few deviations along the route, but we’re heading towards the same destination. I kind of wish there were some things we didn’t have to spoil in terms of the books, but we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. So the show must go on.

Obviously HBO would like this franchise to go on for a while, admitting as much as wishing it would go on for ten years, but the reality is the showrunners see it ending after about seven seasons and with the fifth season just around the corner it would seem we might get that sixth book before the series ends, but not the seventh.

Martin has already revealed the end of the series to the showrunners as Benioff told Vanity Fair, “Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.”

I highly doubt this will have any major effect on the book sales as the audience for both the books and the show are quite rabid and we all know there is no way of including everything Martin writes within the show itself, which will add several layers to the books and plenty more for readers to explore.

“Game of Thrones” season five premieres April 12, on HBO.

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