As the season premiere of Game of Thrones' eighth season draws closer, some of the mysteries surrounding the final few episodes have started to slowly fall away. We've had the Night King speak for the first time, heard details about the Battle of Winterfell that promises an episode to rival "Battle of the Bastards," and, according to the cast, we're going to be emotionally wrecked by the end of the season in general. Now, HBO has revealed the exact length of the first two episodes.
There has been a lot of speculation about how long season eight's episodes would run ever since fans discovered we would only be getting six episodes. There's so much left to the story and so many loose ends to tie up, some viewers find it hard to believe it can all be finished in six, standard one-hour episodes. But that's exactly what we'll be getting with the first two episodes of the eighth season; the series premiere on Sunday, April 14, will be precisely 54 minutes, while the second episode on April 21 will be 58 minutes.
There's no information on the runtimes for the rest of the episodes, but we have a feeling they'll be similar to season seven's, which were 59, 59, 63, 50, 59, 71, and 81 minutes. In January, Entertainment Weekly reported that a group of TV networks in France revealed the alleged runtimes of season eight's episodes, but they were a little too perfect, coming out to exactly 80 minutes each. It's more likely that the final four episodes will be between 65-85 minutes each — especially whichever episode features the Battle of Winterfell, which will allegedly be episode three.
Considering the amount of editing that goes into an episode, the final runtimes are never perfectly rounded and they can change up until the last minute. However, since this is the last season, we have a feeling these episodes will run on the longer side than usual.
