11 Key Details We Have About Game of Thrones Season 8

All good things must come to an end, but we didn't realize just how fast that end was going to come. While speaking at a panel at the SXSW Festival in Austin, TX, in March 2018, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss confirmed that the final season will only consist of six episodes.

"From the beginning, we've wanted to tell a 70-hour movie," Benioff explained. "It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it's stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle, and now we're coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way — I'm very happy we've kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to."

That sounds cool and all, but also NOOOOOOO.

According to Variety, the final six episodes of Game of Thrones will cost a staggering $15 million EACH.

HBO cast two new characters for season eight. There's not a lot to go off of at the moment, but we do know that both of the casting notices are in search of young actors. The first is for a "Northern Girl" who's between the ages of 8-10 and comes from a good family full of soldiers. The notice further describes her as "a straight-talking Northern-accented girl, someone remarkable for her dauntlessness and integrity."

The second role is for a boy of similar age to the female part, with a "physically fit and agile look" and a striking face. The character will be from a poor family, and the actor chosen must be able to "completely own the scenes that he appears in" (which hints that this isn't merely a cameo).

Adding on to what Benioff and Weiss said of the episode count, Game of Thrones sound designer Paula Fairfield disclosed to audiences at the Con of Thrones convention that the season seven finale will reportedly be 82 minutes long and that episodes of season eight will each span 80 (or more) minutes.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the final four people tasked with directing the show are Miguel Sapochnik, David Nutter, and creators and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Nutter has directed six episodes of the show total (including "The Rains of Castamere"), while Sapochnik has also been at the helm of some important episodes, including "Hardhome," "Battle of the Bastards," and "The Winds of Winter." As disappointing as it is to see that no female directors were tapped for the final season, at least we know that the last episodes are in reliable hands.

Season eight's six episodes will be handled by four writers: Dave Hill on episode one, Bryan Cogman on episode two, and the remaining four split between Benioff and Weiss.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Kit Harington said that the eighth season will be much more complex, even though they're narrowing the focus of the show to fewer characters. "They spent an increasing amount of money on less episodes, so it's gonna be much bigger in scale, the CGI," he said. "We're trying new things, experimenting with new camera techniques. I think we're trying to break boundaries and push past boundaries."

He added that although living up to the hype of a show of this scale can be difficult, he thinks the production team is up for the challenge. "The worst thing would be to end without really pushing and trying new things. Even if it's a failure, at least trying to go out with a bang."

Season eight will have the show's biggest battle sequence to date. Vladimír Furdík, the actor behind the famously diabolical Night King, revealed that the epic battle will actually be going down in episode three of season eight, meaning it will happen smack-dab in the middle of the season.

"In the third episode of the last season, there is a battle that the creators intended to be a historic moment in television," Furdík revealed at a fan convention in Hungary, as translated by Mashable. "Almost the full episode will be about the battle, it will take about one hour."

For a reference point, this is the battle where the armies of Westeros go against the Army of the Dead. We're talking giants, dragons, soldiers from the North and South coming together to become one unified battalion. We're talking about a battle sequence that famously took 55 days just to shoot outdoors, which doesn't even count the time they spent filming in the studio.

According to star Kit Harington, the final season was the most intense to work on, and the 32-year-old actor reveals that he was driven to the point of crying more than once.

"The last season of Thrones seemed to be designed to break us," he candidly admitted in GQ Australia's January cover story. "Everyone was broken at the end. I don't know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f*cking tiring. We were sleep deprived."

We were just short of giving up on ever getting a premiere date for Game of Thrones season eight, when, after what's felt like an eternity, HBO revealed the exact date and time during its broadcast of True Detective on Jan. 13. Luckily, the eighth and final season is closer than ever: April 14 at 9 p.m.!