Didn’t see that coming, did you? Though I honestly expected HBO to do a little April Fool’s fun yesterday and announce that the series was either canceled or renewed for infinity, the news hit today that a fourth season of Game of Thrones is getting the go ahead. The premiere this past Sunday across the various ways of viewing it from HBO brought in 4.4 million viewers, raising it up from the previous premieres to make it a new record for the show. The series is one that is doing well for HBO in terms of subscribers but also in expanding all boats as the home video releases are doing very well and they’re drawing in people to the other properties that the company is producing and distributing.
For those worrying about how the series seems to be catching up to the books, George R.R. Martin himself had a few things to say about this in an interview with Collider recently:
MARTIN: Well, I’m writing book 6, The Winds of Winter. I’m starting to worry because everybody keeps asking me, “What are you going to do, if David and Dan and the show catches up to you?,” and I didn’t think it was a problem before, but they’re moving faster than I am and it’s beginning to scare me. I have not failed to notice this. I feel sometimes as if I’m laying track for a railroad and I can hear the locomotive coming up behind me. It’s building speed and I see the smoke and I hear the whistle coming, and I better keep laying that track pretty fast ‘cause I’ll get squashed, if the locomotive comes. But, I still have a pretty considerable lead, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Season 3 is only the first half of book 3. Season 4 will be the second half of book 3. And then, I have book 4 and book 5, and those are gigantic books which have to be recombined because they’re actually parallel. I’m hoping those will be at least two seasons, maybe three. That will give me some time to finish book 6. By the time they’re doing that season, I’ll be writing book 7. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
