When will we see a trailer for Game of Thrones Season 7?

It’s February, and the Game of Thrones season 7 is still a long way off. When exactly will it debut? We still don’t know. All we’re sure of is that, because the show started filming later in the year than usual, it’ll premiere later than usual, landing sometime in the summer of 2017.

The first day of summer is June 21, which means that the premiere is still over four months away, at least. Fans have no choice but to hunker down and wait. But if we know we won’t be seeing the season 7 premiere anytime soon, might we at least see a trailer sometime in the near future?

It’s impossible to know for sure when a trailer will come out—at least some fans were hoping for one during this past Sunday’s Super Bowl—but we can look to the past to see when HBO has sprung them on us before. Maybe that will give us a clue as to when to expect one for season 7.

In the early days before Game of Thrones became such a hot property, the rules were different. Game of Thrones season 1 premiered on April 17, 2011. Believe it or not, HBO released the first official teaser for the season on September 10 of 2010, over seven months beforehand.

Although this isn’t a proper trailer, there’s footage from all over the season in it. Notably, filming on season 1 started on July 12 of 2010, and given the production’s complexity was likely still going on when this teaser was released. For comparison’s sake, filming on season 7 has been going on since September of last year and runs through the end of this month. If it wanted to, HBO certainly has enough footage to string together a trailer and release it now. It’s a matter of timing.

HBO continued to drop looks at season 1 over the next few months, including an 11-minute “Inside Game of Thrones” feature released on January 10. The first official trailer dropped on March 3, 2011, 45 days before the season 1 premiere.

It’s hard to use season 1 as a template for what HBO will do with season 7. Back then, it was trying to stir interest in its new show. Now, the show is popular enough that it doesn’t need to raise awareness, and may be reticent to release too much footage lest it give too much away.

Game of Thrones season 2 premiered on April 1, 2012. A detailed teaser, which featured Stannis darkly intoning about crushing all of his opponents for the crown, came out on December 11, 2011, 112 days before the season 2 premiere.

True, this is technically a teaser rather than a trailer. It’s not as robust as other season 2 trailers HBO released on January 29, February 24, and in March. Still, it’s got plenty of new footage and dialogue from an important new character, which is much more than we got on, for example, season 6 this far ahead of the premiere. Since this period, HBO has gotten more cagey about what it releases teases.

Let’s move on to season 3, which premiered on March 31, 2013. That’s the earliest debut yet for any Game of Thrones season. By now, HBO knew it had a hit on its hands, and was starting to manage footage more carefully. In fact, it knew fans wanted new footage so badly that it created a separate video just to tease the fact that the season 3 trailer would premiere on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on February 22, 2013, a mere 37 days before the season 3 premiere.

The gap wasn’t so close for season 4, which premiered on April 6, 2014. In that case, the first official trailer debuted on January 12, 84 days before the season 3 premiere.

Season 5 premiered on April 12, 2015. This is when HBO started getting much tighter with what it released. For past seasons, HBO would often put out behind-the-scenes featurettes to go along with the official trailers and promos. The gap between the trailer and the season 3 premiere may have been brief, but we got several more informal behind-the-scenes looks before that. For season 5, we got a lengthy “A Day in the Life” feature in February, but that was about it.

The first trailer for Season 5 came out on January 30, 70 days before the season 5 premiere.

Finally, Game of Thrones season 6 premiered on April 24, 2016. We got teasers for this season, but they were generally more cryptic than they’d been in the past. For example, a 41-second teaser video featuring a shot of Jon Snow from “Hardhome” and one new line of dialogue from Bran Stark was released on December 3, 2015.

And after that, in February, HBO released a “Hall of Faces” teaser that featured images of dead characters with old lines of dialogue. Clearly, the network didn’t want to give too much away. Still, both videos got millions of views, which underlines the point that HBO doesn’t really need to put out advance footage to rouse interest.

That’s not to say that it won’t, of course. The first trailer for season 6 debuted on March 8, 2016, 47 days before the season 6 premiere. A second one followed on April 11.

So what does this tell us that we didn’t know before? We know that the gap between the release of the first official trailer and the premiere of the new season has been shrinking since season 4, around the time Game of Thrones stopped being a popular show and started becoming the popular show to end all popular shows, and the cornerstone of HBO’s lineup. We also know that HBO can afford to be as stingy with new footage outside of proper trailers. The run-up to Season 6 was particularly anemic, but keep in mind that the network was working overtime back then to conceal the fact that Jon Snow would be returning from the dead. It has less to hide this time around.

We’re hoping that David Benioff and Dan Weiss might debut a trailer, or at least a teaser, when they speak at this year’s South by Southwest festival in early March, but it’s impossible to say for sure. All we’re sure of is that a trailer is coming and that it can’t come soon enough.

• Published on 02/07/2017 at 12:28 PM CDT
• Last updated on 02/16/2017 at 1:12 PM CDT