Game of Thrones’ assistant director posts, then deletes, major spoiler

GAME of Thrones’ assistant director has been forced to delete an Instagram post which revealed some major spoilers about the final season. WARNING: Spoilers, obviously.

IT IS one of the great cruelties of life that HBO is making us wait till 2019 for the final season of Game of Thrones.

But at least this latest news from the set proves that the network is investing heavily in turning the eighth and last season of the hit show into an epic television event to be remembered.

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In a spoiler-heavy Instagram post — that has since been deleted — assistant director Jonathan Quinlan revealed that the cast and crew had just wrapped a massive 55-day shoot across three separate locations all to recreate a single, significant battle that takes place at the end of next season.

Spoiler alert: This story contains some serious spoiling for season eight of Game of Thrones, all of which takes place after the video below. Scroll down at your own peril.

Everyone still here? Okay, let’s get on with it. Quinlan’s Instagram post, which has been preserved on Watchers on the Wall, included a thankyou note from the producers praising the hard work of season eight’s cast and crew.

“When tens of millions of people around the world watch this episode a year from now, they won’t know how hard you worked,” the note read. “They won’t care how tired you were or how tough it was to do your job in sub-freezing temperatures,” it continue, noting the “55 straight nights” and “cold, snow, rain, mud, sheep s**t and winds of Magheramorne,” that was endured behind-the-scenes.

Fans will have to wait a long time to find out what happens to Jon and Daenerys. Picture: HBO

Magheramorne, in Northern Ireland, is the location of the northernmost part of Westeros, in particular Castle Black and The Wall that borders Stark land and everything north of it. This 55-day mammoth battle shoot is rumoured to have included White Walkers and Free Folk, suggesting that this scene in question will detail the climactic battle between the icy Wights and Jon Snow’s Nights Watch brethren, desperately keeping winter from coming.

Spanning almost two months across three locations, this mystery shoot is likely to be the most expensive and most elaborate bit of action filmmaking on television.

It’s more than double the length of the previous longest shoot for a Game of Thrones battle scene. (That would be the 25-day long sequence to make last season’s ‘The Battle of The Bastards’ episode.) According to Quartzy, a 55-day action shoot may very well be the longest in television history.

And it doesn’t come cheap, either. For ‘The Battle of The Bastards’, HBO roped in 500 extras, 65 stuntmen and 70 horses, with props and logistics wrangled by 600 crew members working behind the scenes. No wonder every episode in Game of Thrones’ final season is rumoured to cost producers almost $20 million each. Ice fire-breathing dragons and dragonglass swords sure are expensive, aren’t they?

We can’t wait to see all that money up on the screen next year. Trust us, we’re already counting down the days.

This story was originally published on Whimn.