HBO Is Going To Insane Lengths To Make Sure 'Game Of Thrones' Season 8 Scripts Don't Leak


Game of Thrones has been plagued by leaks for years now, but last season was a particularly bad one. HBO affiliates accidently aired/leaked not one but two episodes ahead of their air date, but the most brutal leak was probably the dispersion of the scripts for the season, which ended up being an almost entirely accurate summary of nearly every major spoiler meant to surprise fans.

HBO does not want that to happen for what is their final shot at producing a totally spoiler-free season of Games of Thrones, its last. Season 8 only has six episodes, but the scripts for those episodes are under lock and key, even from the actors who need to learn the lines.

This info comes from the chatty Liam Cunningham, a.k.a. Davos Seaworth.

“I got six of [the scripts], I’ve got them all,” Cunningham told IGN, “but I can’t open them because of all the security, and I can’t walk it out.”

He can’t walk it out because they’re digital copies that are only available for viewing at the Game of Thrones studio in Belfast. He needs specific authorization to unlock the digital copies, it seems, and that may not happen until filming is about to take place. Digital scripts won’t be able to taken out of the studio or easily copied, though hopefully they’re being kept off-network in case of another hacking breach like what we saw last year. I’m picturing like a literal iPad fused into the wall that never connects to Wifi, and only the showrunners have the unlock code which they use to show the actors their scenes when the time comes. That may sound silly, but I feel like it might be pretty close to the actual system.


HBO’s other plan to avoid spoilers is allegedly to fool paparazzi who might be trying to sneak on set in person or with drones by shooting multiple fake scenes and endings for the series. That account was later disputed by Jaime Lannister himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who laughed it off saying that it would be preposterously expensive to spend potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars and loads of man hours setting up fake scenes. It seems possible that HBO only put that notion out there because if scenes do leak, maybe people will think they’re fake, even if in truth, fake scenes are not being filmed at all.

The script security hopefully nips that problem in the bud. Next up is HBO rigorously enforcing who has access to episodes in their international affiliates, as that was one of the most pressing problems of last year when those two full episodes leaked early, and important ones at that.

Now that we’re past the shores of the books, it’s somewhat easier to avoid spoilers with millions of readers no longer eager to share their knowledge, but leaks are still a problem, and I hope HBO really can get a handle on them for everyone’s sake.

