Renowned tea-spiller George R. R. Martin has given a cryptic update on the status of the much-hyped Game of Thrones spinoffs currently slated for production at HBO.
Martin reckons a couple of the Game of Thrones spinoff series have been “shelved” due to some BTS drama going down at the network.
To cut a long and kind of boring story short: back in April 2022, WarnerMedia (the company that owns HBO Max) merged with Discovery to create Warner Bros. Discovery. Since the merger there’s been BTS changes aplenty including big-ass budget cuts.
It won’t shock you that Game of Thrones spinoff series cost mucho moolah to create, so the handful of shows that were originally in the production schedule aren’t set in stone anymore.
Last week George R. R. Martin posted on Not a Blog (his blog that is most definitely a blog) to update fans on what he’s currently working on. Of course Martin mentions The Winds of Winter (the Game of Thrones book he’s famously taken yonks to finish) but he popped a spicy aside to the HBO drama in his blog post too.
Yes, WINDS OF WINTER, yes, yes. And HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, season two. And several of the other successor shows that we’re developing with HBO. (Some of those are moving faster than others, as is always the case with development. None have been greenlit yet, though we are hoping… maybe soon. A couple have been shelved, but I would not agree that they are dead. You can take something off the shelf as easily as you can put it on the shelf. All the changes at HBO Max have impacted us, certainly).
TEA.
A quick refresher on the Game of Thrones spinoff series that were originally slated: the first to be greenlit was House of the Dragon (which aired its first season in 2022). There’s also The Sea Snake which was apparently “the furthest along in development” according to Entertainment Weekly. If that name is familiar, we met Corlys Corlys Velaryon AKA the Sea Snake (Steve Toussaint) in HotD.
Kit Harington was also tapped to star in a Jon Snow sequel series, plus there was Ten Thousand Ships, a prequel set 1000 years before the events of GoT about Princess Nymeria, a House Martell ancestor who founded Dorne. A series based on Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas was also in the works.
Obviously Martin doesn’t name which Game of Thrones spinoff series have been shelved in his cryptic blog post, so guess we’re just going to have to wait to see which series are on the chopping block.
It’s not the first time a Game of Thrones spinoff has been unceremoniously killed. Back in 2019, a prequel series starring Aussie Naomi Watts was cancelled before it even got off the ground. Savage.
