The Game Of Thrones studio tour opens in 2020, will now include more famous stabbing locations
Last year, HBO announced that it had decided to launch a Game Of Thrones tourist attraction in Northern Ireland by opening up the sets used for Winterfell, Castle Black, and King’s Landing to the public. These big fictional castles would also be updated with the sort of informational exhibits you might find at a museum, so fans can ooh and ahh over the corner where Tyrion slapped Joffrey, the tower where Bran got paralyzed, and the doorway where Jon Snow got murdered. It’s a little sad that people would probably care more about that stuff than actual history, but whatever, Game Of Thrones is a bigger deal than actual history. At the time, the plan was to open the sets up in 2019 and launch new tours of the Linen Mill Studios location where many indoor scenes were shot for the show, but now that timetable is getting pushed back and it sounds like the Linen Mill portion is being expanded.
As reported by The New York Times, the Game Of Thrones studio tour will open in 2020, with Linen Mill Studios now being converted into a 110,000-square foot Game Of Thrones exhibit, with sets and props from across all of Westeros (a photo features the Dragonstone throne room that Daenerys has been hanging out in, but the story doesn’t mention specifics beyond that). Whatever locations it features, the story does say that the sets will be rebuilt by the same construction crews that worked on the show, so at least their experience building chairs out of things that are not normally chairs won’t be going to waste just yet.
Meanwhile, plans for the actual aforementioned castle locations have not been—prepare for intended pun—set in stone, so it still might be a while before fans can walk around Winterfell for real. Still, hanging out in perfect recreations of some of Winterfell’s interior rooms, possibly while poking at real Game Of Thrones props and interacting with professional Game Of Thrones cosplayers, is just as good.