Game of Thrones fans who didn’t resent the series after the embarrassing ending have a lot to look forward to. There will be another series based on the fantasy saga written by George RR Martin in the coming years, and it won’t be just one. And that is far from all.
The prequel to Game of Thrones, called Dragonborn, which hit the screens in 2022, was a very risky bet from HBO.
One episode of the first season cost around $20 million, making it one of the most expensive series in history. In addition, it premiered just a few months after HBO’s owner’s extraordinarily expensive merger with Discovery, which left the newly formed company with $45 billion in debt.
However, it paid off, the prequel to Game of Thrones broke several viewership records and confirmed that interest in the world of dragons, intrigue and ubiquitous violence from the pen of George RR Martin is not waning. Although it has been several years since the end of the once most popular series in the world, which left many fans with very conflicting feelings.
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the owner of the TV rights, looks determined to make the most of the popularity of Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire. Season 2 of Dragonborn will premiere this June, JB Perrette, head of streaming at WBD, recently revealed . Then more spin-offs will follow.
Filming of the series with the working title A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight should begin soon. It is based on a series of shorter novellas by Martin, which were published in Czech as a book under the title Knight of Seven Kingdoms.
Their plot revolves around the adventures of a knight-errant and his squire, who hides his royal origins. And as is customary in Martin’s Westland, the continent is torn by dynastic rifts of the ruling families.
The story is set in the period after the events of House of the Dragon and roughly ninety years before the events depicted in Game of Thrones. The series received a so-called straight-to-series order, HBO ordered the entire series instead of the standard production process, where the pilot is filmed and then it is judged whether it is worth continuing the project.
The news already has a premiere date. It will appear on the Max streaming service, still known domestically as HBO Max, late next year.
With Dragonborn, fans have been waiting two years for a new series, so if Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is also picked up, HBO will be able to serve fans new content from the Game of Thrones world every year.
However, there may be many more series in the finale. There is intense speculation in particular about the Snow project, which should be a follow-up to Game of Thrones. As the working title suggests, the character of Jon Snow, played by Kit Harrington, will be at the center of the action.
The spin-off has yet to be greenlit, but one of Harrington’s co-stars, John Bradley, hinted last week that it is still in the works.
The first mention of the Snow project appeared already in the middle of 2022. Three years after the disappointing end of the Game of Thrones, it caused rather raised eyebrows. Paste magazine asked if HBO could «feel even more desperate». Vice reported that the creators at HBO had «hit rock bottom».
George RR Martin himself confirmed the rumors at the time. «Yes, a Jon Snow series is in the works,» he said on his blog , adding that the idea came from Harrington, who would like to reprise the role of his life.
In a post from June 2022, Martin also wrote that a total of four other spin-offs are awaiting the green light at HBO after Dragonborn.
We have already mentioned two of them here, the other is a project called 10,000 Ships, which predates the events of Game of Thrones by a thousand years. There is no further information available about this venture, only Martin’s statement that it will be an epic story reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey.
Another spin-off is called Nine voyages. The main character here is to be Corlys Velarion, nicknamed the Sea Serpent, who appeared in Dragonborn, played by actor Steve Toussaint. The series is supposed to depict his sea adventures from his youth, and HBO is working on it from at least 2021.
It was originally intended to be live-action, but Martin said three months ago that the creators ultimately preferred an animated version. «A live version would probably be prohibitively expensive, as half the action takes place at sea and a different port would need to be created every week,» he wrote on his blog .
In addition to this anime, a cartoon series about the Yi-Ti Empire, which is Martin’s fantasy version of Imperial China, which is only marginally mentioned in the book series A Song of Ice and Fire, is also reportedly in the works. There are also not many details available about this project yet.
Another spin-off, which describes the accession of the Targaryen dynasty to the throne, has slightly clearer contours and directly precedes the Dragonborn series. Screenwriter Mattson Tomlin, who became famous for the two-year-old film The Batman with Robert Pattinson, is already working on this as-yet-untitled project.
However, of the many projects on paper, only the sequels of House of the Dragon and Knight of the Seven Kingdoms have the green light so far. The rest may well end up like the considered spin-offs Bloodmoon, Flea Bottom or The Long Night, which HBO has cut in recent years. For Bloodmoon with actress Naomi Watts, where the pilot episode was shot, the studio spent 30 million dollars.
