Counting this season, which begins on Sunday and will run ten episodes, there are three seasons of Game of Thrones left, which means that there will be between 23 and 30 more episodes of the show. But that doesn’t mean that HBO will be done with Westeros (and Essos).
HBO’s programming president Michael Lombardo told Entertainment Weekly that there are no spin-offs planned, for now. Asked about the network’s plans, Lombardo said, “If [a spinoff] were to happen it would have to come from [showrunners Benioff and Weiss] really feeling something, or [George R.R. Martin] really feeling that it was the right thing to do. ... We’re always going to be drawn to a strong creative vision. But we are not going to do that unless we feel their passion.”
But Martin, who has been open about the possibility of spinoffs for quite a while, told Entertainment Weekly that there were “eight million stories” in Westeros and “even more” in “Essos and the lands beyond.” And he even had a suggestion: his Dunk and Egg prequel novellas, which take place roughly a century before the action of A Song of Ice and Fire and follow Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg, who became Aegon V (aka Maester Aemon’s brother aka The Mad King’s grandfather).
Whether Benioff and Weiss would be involved is anyone’s guess—it wouldn’t be shocking if they wanted a rest after eight seasons of Thrones. But HBO has a massive hit in Game of Thrones and staying in the Westeros business makes sense for the network—especially if Martin is open to it.