Game of Thrones fans have had a longer-than-usual wait for the show to return for Season 7. The Season 6 finale aired all the way back in June 2016, but due to Ned Stark's much-memed warning having finally come true and winter arriving, the shoot for the next batch of episodes was delayed to ensure accurate locations. It's now been announced that the show will be back on HBO with its season premiere on July 16th, meaning there are just over four more months to go before we return to Westeros.
Hopefully it'll be worth the wait. This season will run only seven episodes long, three shorter than usual, but there's a lot going down in Westeros. It's expected that this run will deal with the three warring forces of newly-crowned Queen Cersei in King's Landing, King in the North Jon Snow, and invader/reclaimer Daenerys Targaryen coming against each other, ahead of the long-teased showdown against the deadly magic of the White Walkers in Season 8. Otherwise known as The Great War of Fire and Ice.
To start building hype for the new season, HBO has released a new teaser trailer on the Game of Thrones Twitter account. Using models of the major house sigils and choice quotes from the show, it serves as both a recap of where we left off and a tease of where the show is heading. Check it out above.
Across the respective sigils, we hear various key moments from previous seasons, including Dany discuss the Mad King, King Robert vowing to kill every Targaryen, Joffrey ordering the execution of Ned Stark, Balon Greyjoy welcoming son Theon, Roose Bolton at the Red Wedding and Lady Tyrell's reveal she killed the King. Then the teaser moves into its meat, with the Tyrell rose burnt in green fire as Cersei is pronounced Queen (a reference to her killing most of that family at the end of Season 6) and Dany's now-iconic speech about the wheel of changing rulers she intendeds to break. The models, revealed to be intertwined, begin to collapse and as we hear Jon Snow talk about the great war to come the camera zooms out to reveal the rubble forming the spiral associated with the White Walkers before the shot settles on one of the Others' pale blue eyes.
It's a very effective tease, one that manages to hint at the core of what we can expect over the final thirteen episodes without having to explicitly give much away or even use any new footage; the clip shows just how complicated the show has been, before reminding everyone of the real mystical threat out there that eclipses any petty political dealing. At this point, Game of Thrones' return creates its own hype, and this very much lets the show's existence do the leg-work.
That said, with four months to go until the premiere date, expect the usual marketing blitz from HBO to start soon. The first proper trailer for Season 6 came out about a month and a half before the show's return, so it'd be fair to expect some proper footage to start appearing online around the beginning of the summer months.
Source: Game of Thrones