The final Game of Thrones episodes will cost a lot to make, so what does that mean for viewers?
HBO has drastically upped the budget for the eightth season of the hit series. So what will the extra spending deliver? Here are a few guesses ...
HBO is shelling out major cash for the final season of Game of Thrones. Each episode will cost about US$15 million, according to Variety. To give some frame of reference, the series cost about US$6 million per instalment in its early days. More recently, it’s reached the upper end of the television budget spectrum, matching Netflix’s The Crown with a per-episode budget of US$10 million.
So this is a pretty substantial jump, but what does a 50 per cent increase in budget mean for the audience? HBO is famously tight-lipped about keeping plot developments under wraps, so we can only guess. But we have a few ideas.
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Time
The final season only has six episodes, but each will last least 80 minutes. Since GoT episodes typically tend to run for about 50 minutes – with the occasional exception – it makes sense that the final episodes, which are about 50 per cent longer, would also be 50 per cent more expensive.
Talent
Remember when Game of Thrones started with a cast that included “that angry guy from Elf ” and “the queen from 300”? Well now those actors, and the rest of the cast, are household names with a few awards and many nominations between them.
Salaries have reflected the success, with the top five – Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau – commanding the same high pay, which is ... well, a bit of a mystery. But somewhere between US$500,000 and US$2.5 million per episode.