That would put the end of Game of Thrones after season eight, where season six is currently being filmed and will broadcast in 2016. Eight seasons would mean the show would take its final bow in 2018.

Lombardo has previously expressed a desire to see Game of Thrones run ten seasons, but ultimately defers to the showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss. In contrast, for a good long while they wanted to do a “seven books, seven seasons” type run, but as I remarked back in March, that seemed insanely ambitious. At the time, they still had four books to fit into three seasons on that schedule, compared to filming four seasons out of three books previously.
Now, season five has come and gone, and Benioff and Weiss did the impossible of combining two of Martin’s books into one season, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. It helped that the two were both set in the same stretch of time, just featuring different characters, but it still required a lot of fat-cutting to finish almost all of both by the end of one season. Though fans will likely admit there was a lot of fat to be cut in those books, and season five still felt bogged down in some places by sub-par plotlines like Dorne.

An eight season run is a logical compromise that I actually suggested when this came up last. Between seven and ten seasons, it’s enough to tell the story without feeling rushed, and without dragging by the end. I suspected we might see a “supersized” eighth season, with a couple extra episodes, or at least longer “event” episodes near the end. I still believe that will probably be the case.