Game Of Thrones Season 7: Everything We Know So Far
8. But It Has (Roughly) The Same Production
With the show having fewer episodes, it'd also be reasonable to expect that it would have a reduction in production too.
Intriguingly, however, that has not been the case, with Iain Glen (who plays Jorah Mormont) telling Radio Times:
"They are taking the length of time it takes to shoot ten episodes to shoot just seven this year and six next year. There are fifteen more hours left in Thrones as we understand it, but that may change, but that’s as far as we know.
“I think the scale and size of the set pieces, the world that is being created it’s just getting more and more extraordinary and they feel they need that time to shoot seven hours as opposed to ten.”
A couple of things stand out there. One is the time they're putting into it, which means that they'll have had more time to focus on getting absolutely everything right. You'd also assume it has the same budget as a regular season, which should mean bigger episodes in both scale and length - note that he says seven and six episodes, but 15 hours. We might well be getting a couple of supersized episodes this year. That tallies with what Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm) told Mashable:
"I’m just in awe of how everybody’s managing to fit as much as there is into seven episodes, because it doesn’t necessarily feel like a normal season, it feels bigger."