Recently, the cast members for Game of Thrones met up for a table reading of the script for the last season, which is the immediate step preceding the start of shooting for the series. However, interested individuals should not expect spoilers to come out in the near future because HBO is coming down on leaks. For example, Liam Cunningham commented that while he received the script before the table reading, he was not able to either read the script or bring the script home with him. This speaks volumes about HBO’s seriousness when it comes to this particular matter, though it remains to be seen whether it will be successful or not.
Why Is HBO So Serious about Security for GoT Scripts?
There are a number of reasons that HBO is so serious about preventing leaks for the last season of Game of Thrones. For example, Game of Thrones is reliant on shock for much of its impact, meaning that a leak could blunt its effect on its viewers. Furthermore, leaked information is often nothing more than an imperfect summary of the real content, meaning that it is not unknown for such information to send interested individuals into an uproar by encouraging their imaginations to fill in the missing gaps with the worst of what could happen. In both cases, a leak has the real potential to hurt Game of Thrones‘s numbers, which would be a serious problem for HBO at a time when it is looking into the potential of other series set in the A Song of Ice and Fire setting. After all, while Game of Thrones built up an enormous fan-base, HBO will need as much momentum as possible to convince those people to watch a separate series with a separate cast as well as a separate narrative, even if it is in the same setting.
Furthermore, it is important to note that HBO has had a number of rather embarrassing incidents resulting in leaks over the course of Game of Thrones, which seem to have been particularly bad in the previous season. For example, there was the time when someone hacked HBO before posting summaries of the episodes on the Internet. Furthermore, there was an episode leaked in India as well as a second episode leaked in Spain, which soon resulted in those episodes being posted on file-sharing sites well ahead of time. Suffice to say that HBO has no interest in seeing a repeat of those incidents for the last season, which explains why it is taking the issue so seriously.
In fact, it should be mentioned that what Liam Cunningham has described is but one of the security measures that will be used to prevent a leak. For example, the people behind Game of Thrones are actually planning to make multiple versions of the ending so as to make sure that no one will know which is the real ending until the episode has actually been released. At times, one cannot help but wonder whether this might be a bit too much, particularly since it should be the journey rather than the ending that really matters for a media project when all has been said and done.
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