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The final season of 'Game of Thrones' will be six episodes long only. _Game of Thrones_ fans will have to wait until 2019 for the planned final season of the award-winning medieval
fantasy series, a gap of more than a year since the end of season seven. Cable channel HBO said on Thursday that _Game of Thrones_ would return in 2019 for a six-episode final season. It
did not specify the month. > It's official: @GameOfThrones will return for its six-episode, > eighth and final season in 2019. > — HBO PR (@HBOPR) January 4, 2018 The series is
HBO's biggest hit ever with some 30 million viewers in the United States alone and an army of devoted fans worldwide. The final season of the Emmy Award-winning show is expected to
reveal which of the warring families in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros will win the multigenerational struggle for control of the Iron Throne. Production on the final season
started in October, and filming is expected to last until mid-2018. HBO's head of programming, Casey Bloys, has said multiple endings will be filmed to avoid leaks or hacks of how the
saga ends. > Send a raven.#GameofThrones returns to @HBO for its eighth and final > season in 2019: https://t.co/FpWV0O0L9i > — Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) January 4, 2018 Show
creators David Benioff and DB Weiss told Entertainment Weekly in 2016 that they wanted to make the series finale as spectacular as possible. HBO said on Thursday that Benioff and Weiss will
also direct the final season. The seventh season ended last August with an average of more than 30 million US viewers per episode across multiple platforms. Some of its seven episodes were
more than an hour long. The long gap until the final season would give author George RR Martin the chance to finish one or two new _Game of Thrones_ books that he said in July he was working
on. The television series has already advanced beyond the events of Martin's five published _A Song of Ice and Fire_ series of novels.