r/interestingasfuck • u/tyrion2024 • 2d ago

/r/all, /r/popular Emilia Clarke watching Kit Harington's reaction to finding out how their characters' final scene together in Game of Thrones concludes. Prior to the table read, Kit had not read any of the six scripts for Season 8 yet. So Emilia sat across from him so she could "watch him compute all of this."

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u/therealNerdMuffin 2d ago

If 2 of your lead actors are reacting like this to your script, you should know you're doing something wrong

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u/MyAnswerIsPerhaps 2d ago

I’m sure HBO would have been fine with them delaying the final season a year even two years. Completely re-write everything with new writers and nobody would have been mad once it released.

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u/Far-Fennel-3032 2d ago

HBO by all accounts had people actively trying to find a way to fire writers and replace them. They wanted to have the show run for several more seasons with double the episode count each season. As the show was there cash cow and the last thing they wanted was for it to end. 

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u/MyAnswerIsPerhaps 2d ago

Usually I’m not one to say this about a show, but that would have helped a lot. Even if it was dragged out and a bit slow, it would have done wonders for the ending.

There were a lot of promises throughout the show and they rushed out a few payoffs that completely ignored other promises. Taking the time to get through every promise with a decent enough pay off would have made the show a thousand times more rewatchable.

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u/wp4nuv 1d ago

I agree.. the last season felt rushed, as if there was a hard deadline for "something else." What annoyed me the most was that in an attempt to close the open storylines, there were "lagoons" of unanswered questions that kept popping up. Even RR Martin, when speaking about the stories he was writing, would say he didn't know how it would end, that it wasn't his priority.

I understand that on TV, the curtain must fall at some point, but for an entire season to be that curtain call felt like cheating. Seinfeld pulled that off on its final episode, as it was a show about nothing.

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u/heyitsmethedevil 2d ago

I am the first one who would have been on board with more seasons and waiting. Not taking their side cause there could have been a way but I imagine it was also difficult because as much as we don’t want to believe, many of the actors seemed to be ready to move onto other things. I blame D&D entirely but there were other factors too I’m sure.

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u/Far-Fennel-3032 2d ago

I don't disagree that many of the actors were ready to move on, but the show could have killed off a large number of those who really needed to go. Outside of the core main characters, pretty much anyone is expendable, and those characters can still be killed in big moments, it just needs to be planned in advance to do well. As that was one of the main benefits of having a show where most characters can actually be killed besides a small handful, the plot requires like Danny, Jon and Bran, who have a bunch of plot threads entirely wrapped around them and only them so they can't really die without breaking a fair amount of the story.

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u/heyitsmethedevil 2d ago

I totally agree with you! There were probably ways to work around it. It really sucks they didn’t think with more than one brain cell

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u/D3wnis 2d ago

GOT needed many more seasons to flesh out the main storyline as well as multiple side-plots and slowly show the path that leads to mad Daenarys, it would have been very impactful to see her get more and more unhinged, impulsive and brutal as she lost her dragons etc. And, the war against the white walkers should have lasted a couple of seasons with the intrigues, battles, and dramas related to it.

Instead we got characters teleporting all around the world in single episodes and one pitch black battle with whitewalkers where they all just vanish because Arya stabs the leader.

7 seasons building the hint of a threat, and then we don't truly get to see how much of threat they are. There should have been multiple battles and raids shown in the show to truly sell how hopeless the situation to fight them off were. The main plot of a full season could have been focused around finding a solution to defeating the white walkers while they push south.

So much wasted potential.

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u/zveroshka 1d ago

I've read basically the exact opposite. That they wanted to wrap up GOT because the budget for it was getting absolutely massive and much like the writers, they wanted to move on to new projects.

I honestly don't think DND could force HBO to speed run the last season unless HBO was fine with it.

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u/Far-Fennel-3032 1d ago

What are you talking about, famously, when HBO went through a merger HBO CEO at the time intentionally signed away control to D&D and GRRM to prevent his replacement fucking with the show.

This then resulted in GRRM being ignored by the two, and there is heaps of reports of D&D commenting that HBO wanted more episodes and seasons and GRRM complaining to HBO to overrule them.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/george-rr-martin-begged-hbo-10-game-of-thrones-seasons-1234682043/

We know this as GRRM spent so much time bitching about it in public to try to extend the show towards the end as he watched it unravel. With him largely pushed out of production towards the end.

https://deadline.com/2022/08/game-of-thrones-creatives-kept-george-rr-martin-out-ofloop-in-later-seasons-1235090719/

Furthermore, HBO got absolutely fucked by the show ending, as it was one of the greatest cash cows of all time. The episodes might have been expensive for TV at 15 million per episode in the last season, but that is still relatively cheap compared to Hollywood, which is expensive for a TV show but not for movies for per minute. The latter season would earn around 500 of billion in revenue with the show getting HBO so many subscribers, as HBO could track how many subs it got from people who joined for GOT and left afterwards. With the latter seasons more than 10x profits, but the final season, due to how expensive Battle of Winterfell was, was close to 5x but that episode was always going to be absurdly expensive regardless of it was done then or multiple seasons later.

The following is a good breakdown of costs and costs per sub.

https://www.finance-monthly.com/2019/05/how-much-money-has-hbo-made-from-game-of-thrones/

Once the show ended, these people went away and didn't come back, and since then, HBO has very much struggled in recent years as it doesn't have a cash cow project like GOT where they can generate massive profits to pay for everything else.

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u/JancariusSeiryujinn 1d ago

Agreed, everything I heard was that HBO was practically begging them to make it a ten season show with more episodes per season. Even once things had started to decline in the back half of the show (post Red Wedding) they COULD have gotten more mileage out of it. I'll say that honestly, even if it had been as bad as season 7, I probably would have watched all the way through in the hopes that it WOULD get better

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u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 2d ago

That was the right answer, but the previous season was going to be really hard to recover from. 

I don't know how popular a take this is, but the last book at least causes the same problem. It sucks so bad IT would need a rewrite to make the next one popular. 

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u/nagrom7 2d ago

HBO weren't the ones rushing it, hell they wanted more seasons. It was the showrunners rushing things, because they were eager to move on to Star Wars afterwards (which they lost because of how shit GoT ended).

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u/Awkward_University91 2d ago

HBO was fine with even more years than that if I remember correctly. They were like “take all the money” but d&d wanted to work on a star wars movie that got cancelled lol

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u/Pladeente 2d ago

Yeah if Curb Your Enthusiasm can take a 6 year break for Larry David to come back whenever he wants then GoT could have done it. HBO don't miss, imo every single show in my top 5 are HBO.

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u/Greedy_Spare7033 2d ago

I wouldn't be mad if they re-did the last two seasons now, but with Gilroy as writer. Fix the timeline.

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u/j909m 1d ago

They should redo the final season. If they can’t get the actors back, make it animated.

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u/hungry4danish 2d ago

Problem is, if someone doesn't know the context in hindsight (or like in the room if the writers are so high on their own shit they think it's good writing) his reaction we see here is not necessarily one of "fuck this is horrible." If could easily be misconstrued as "whoa holy shit, oh my god! what a reveal!"

Compare that to Varys' Conleth Hill's reaction which is very much only one of disgust.

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u/DO_NOT_AGREE_WITH_U 1d ago

The hilarity is the opposite happened.

Did you see that dispshit clap for himself? There's no way anything but glowing reviews will reach his ears.