Game of Thrones season 8 episode running times 'revealed' by HBO affiliate

The series's biggest battle will last for almost three hours

While the final season of Game of Thrones may only be six episodes long, the overall runtime of the season looks set to match season seven.

HBO boss Casey Bloys, as well as showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, previously teased that each episode will be feature-length.

However, just recently, he destroyed the hopes of fans who were hopeful that each could last for two hours: “They are not going to be [two hours long],“ he told Entertainment Weekly. ”Not that I’ve seen, anyway.”

While the cable channel has yet to give official word, an overseas affiliate of HBO – French network OCS – gave Première magazine some hard numbers.

According to them, the eighth and final season will begin with two hour-long episodes, with the remaining four lasting for 80-minutes each.

Fansite Watchers on the Wall were quick to do some calculations, working out that this puts season eight at eaxactly the same length as season seven: 440 minutes (that’s seven hours and 20 minutes).

This goes hand-in-hand with the previoulsy confirmed fact that the scenes being touted as featuring the biggest battle in the history of television will be in episodes three and four. That means two hours and 40 minutes of Game of Thrones‘s final season will be dedicated to the showdown its been teasing since the very first episode.

Only one small piece of new footage from the final six episodes has been released by HBO so far. A cryptic trailer has also been released featuring several moments (the feather!) that hint at huge revelations to come, most notably one that suggests Bran could be the biggest villain in Westeros.

You can find a full list of everything we know about the final season here.