Game of Thrones: The Final Season Has an Insanely Huge Budget

Having just learned that one of Game of Thrones’ most ambitious and capable directors, Miguel Sapochnik (“Battle of the Bastards,” “Hardhome”), could very well direct half of the show’s final season, fans may now rejoice to learn just how many resources the director will have at his disposal. The network is ramping up the budget, big time, for the eighth and final season of the jewel in its Peak TV crown. According to a new report from Variety, the final six episodes of Game of Thrones will cost a staggering $15 million apiece—and we’ve heard the real budget may actually be much, much higher than that.

In recent years, the standard for oh-my-God-that’s-expensive TV has been around $10 million per episode. That’s the incredible amount Netflix put down for both its enormously successful The Crown and its far less successful The Get Down. It’s also, ballpark, what an episode of Game of Thrones has cost HBO for the past few years. But the final six episodes of Thrones will all reportedly be feature-length. The longest episode of the series to date, the Season 7 finale, clocked in at just shy of 80 minutes—and each episode of the final season would be even longer than that.

So it stands to reason that if each episode is roughly half again as long as the standard $10 million installment, then it should cost $15 million—a.k.a. half again as much or more. Thrones sound designer Paula Fairfield told Vanity Fair that there were more dragon scenes in Season 7 than in any of the other seasons combined, and we can only expect there to be even more in Season 8 as our heroes gather around Daenerys for the Great War to Come. Fairfield even teased that we’ll likely see a dragon-on-dragon battle between Drogon and his undead brother, Viserion. Those special effects (which have improved immeasurably over the years) will be costly. There are also all those zombie giants marching in the army of the undead to consider, as well as those incredible stunt-riding Dothraki screamers.

But there’s also the possibility that with such an astronomical budget, Thrones won’t have to sacrifice fan-favorite elements—like the surviving Stark direwolves—in order to make room for dragons. When asked why Jon’s wolf, Ghost (who was completely cut from Season 7), didn’t show up in his Season 6 episode “Battle of the Bastards,” Sapochnik cited the budget: “[Ghost] was in there in spades originally, but it's also an incredibly time-consuming and expensive character to bring to life. Ultimately, we had to choose between Wun-Wun [the giant] and the direwolf, so the dog bit the dust.” With Arya’s wolf, Nymeria, likely to return for the final battle and Ghost very much in need of at least one final scene, this swollen budget means Sapochnik and the other directors may not be forced to choose between dragons, giants, and direwolves (oh my).

Still, it’s dazzling to consider just how far Game of Thrones has come. In recent years, show-runners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff may have been able to command $10 million per episode for a show that has become famous for its visually dazzling battles—but back in Season 2 they had to go begging to even include a fight. After nimbly side-stepping the Battle of Green Fork altogether in the first season (Tyrion gets knocked out and wakes to find all the fighting over), Weiss and Benioff almost had to do the same for the now-famous Battle of Blackwater Bay.

“We almost had no battle at all,” Benioff told Entertainment Weekly at the time. “For budgetary reasons, we came very, very close to having all the action take place off-screen, the way plays have handled battle scenes for a few thousand years. The idea was that we’d set most of the episode in Maegor’s Holdfast. Cersei and Sansa would be cooped up in there with the other noblewomen and children, hearing occasional reports from the battlements. Last year we had to cut a battle we wanted to shoot, and the Battle of Blackwater Bay is far more important. To our minds, the entire season builds to this clash, and if we didn’t see any of it, we were undercutting the story and short-changing the audience.”

Weiss and Benioff were able to negotiate a $2 million increase on their then-$6 million-per-episode budget, and that $8 million episode became a calling card for the series. Already somewhat popular, the costly green wildfire inferno proved that this was a show able to compete with the spectacle of cinematic blockbusters. The show’s ambitions have only grown since then, with dramatic fights in episodes like “Hardhome,” “Battle of the Bastards,” and “The Spoils of War” exceeding even the imagination of George R.R. Martin—given that these battles have either not taken place yet or did not appear “on screen” in the books.

But while the swollen budget on something like Game of Thrones makes sense, given the show’s scope, its ambition, and its value to HBO, Variety points out that elsewhere in Peak TV land, the out-sized spending isn’t quite as visible on screen. “I look at a show like 13 Reasons Why,” Susanne Daniels, global head of content for YouTube, said at a September Variety summit. “On Netflix, [it costs] $5 million an episode. I made shows like that for years at the WB [Network] for $2 million an episode. It’s ‘interior high school,’ ‘interior home.’ There’s no rhyme or reason to what they’re paying.”

One factor driving up price tags is what FX President and TV visionary John Landgraf recently called the “epic titanic fight for talent.” Netflix and its deep pockets were able to woo Ryan Murphy away from his home at FX, and Shonda Rhimes away from hers at ABC. Meanwhile, earlier this month, HBO reaped the Emmy rewards of winning its bidding war with Netflix over the star-studded Big Little Lies. With Robert De Niro commanding a staggering $775,000 an episode to star in a David O. Russell crime drama for Amazon, the message of the TV industry right now is that you can have anyone you want—as long as you’re willing to pay.

All this may explain why HBO is steadfastly sticking by Weiss and Benioff, no matter how expensive their final Thrones season may be—or how controversial their follow-up project, Confederate, winds up being. All the competing, deep-pocketed companies have no doubt dangled incredibly generous offers in front of Weiss and Benioff, the two biggest success stories in the business. So in order to keep their best race horses (dragons?) in the stable, HBO will have to pony up both money and loyalty. Given the astronomical popularity of Thrones, it seems a wise (if expensive) gamble to take.

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