Earlier this year, George R.R. Martin dropped hints that the upcoming fifth season of Game of Thrones might spoil events from the Song of Ice on Fire books on which the series is based, nothing that characters would be killed off this season that are still alive in the novels. Now it looks like showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have confirmed those rumors.
Moviefone was on hand when the duo made an appearance at the Oxford Union, where an attendee inquired about the potential for the the series to overtake the books. Here’s what Benioff had to say:
“We’ve been talking to [Martin] for a while about this. The fact is, we didn’t want to catch up. Obviously, we would hope that the books would come out ahead of the show. But at the same time, George has his process. And if it takes him 20 years to finish the series, that’s what it should take him. He’s writing, to my mind, the great fantasy epic of our time. So we can’t rush him and I wouldn’t want to rush him. [But] at the same time, we can’t put the show on hiatus. …
So we have to kind of keep pushing forward. Luckily, we’ve been talking about this with George for a long time, ever since we saw this could happen, and we know where things are heading. So we’ll eventually basically meet up at pretty much the same place where George is going [in “A Dream of Spring”]. There might be a few deviations along the route, but we’re heading towards the same destination. I kind of wish there were some things we didn’t have to spoil in terms of the books, but we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. So the show must go on.
I think the thing that’s kind of fun for George is the idea that he can still have surprises for people even once they’ve watched the show through to the conclusion. There are certain things that are going to happen in the books that are different from the show, and I think people who love the show and want more — want to know more about the characters, want to know more about the different characters who might not have made the cut for the show — will be able to turn to the books.”
So there you have it. This has always been a possibility, and pretty much everyone involved had hoped this wouldn’t happen. But the sixth volume of the book series, The Winds of Winter, won’t be published until 2016 at the earliest, and it’s doubtful that Martin would be able to get the final book onto shelves before the beginning of the seventh season.
But as Benioff pointed out, this doesn’t mean that the books won’t contain surprises – the show has already diverged from the source material in some ways, and as Benioff and Weiss craft the sixth and seventh seasons of Game of Thrones without any existing source material to reference, this trend is bound to continue.
Game of Thrones returns for its fifth season on April 12, exclusively on HBO.
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