'Game Of Thrones' Season 8 Confirmed? Cast Gets Hefty Pay Raises

By Emily Marks

Jun 23, 2016 09:41 AM EDT

"Game of Thrones" season 8 has been confirmed. This comes after the main cast has renewed their contracts for the series.

In a previous report by Deadline, the lead "Game of Thrones" cast has landed hefty pay raises for season 7. Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Kit Harington (Jon Snow), Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) will be earning up to $300,000 per episode.

This time, Deadline reported that Dinklage, Harington, Headey, Clarke and Coster-Waldau will instead be paid $500,000 per episode of "Game of Thrones" season 7 and season 8. This is not a guarantee, though, that all five characters will survive until the end of the series.

"Game of Thrones" season 7 and 8 are said to be shorter than the standard 10 episodes for the show. The delay of George R.R. Martin's "The Winds of Winter" release date may be the cause.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the season 7 raises came as a part of an option between HBO and the cast's Oct. 2014 deal, which saw the five stars become the highest-paid actors on cable TV. The option on season 7 has been exercised and packaged with season 8.

The publication noted that "Game of Thrones" season 8 has not been confirmed yet. However, it is already expected since showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have revealed that there is still less than a hundred hours before the series ends.

"In the beginning, we hoped that if the show worked, we'd get seven seasons to tell the tale," they said. "Seven kingdoms, seven gods, seven books - seven felt like a lucky number. The actual messiness of storytelling might not be quite that numerologically elegant, but we're looking at somewhere between 70 and 75 hours before the credits roll for the last time."

Vanity Fair added that the "Game of Thrones" cast is still being divided into tiers. Some of the younger stars such as Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams are paid less than their adult co-stars.