Good news for everyone who’s found their TV-watching habits insufficiently dragon-filled since Game Of Thrones went off the air last year: HBO president Casey Bloys has hazily confirmed that the show’s spin-off prequel, House Of The Dragon, will run on the network some time in 2022. That’s a measly two years away, i.e., still plenty of time for people to have finally calmed down about how the original series ended in a big wet dragon fart, right? (Right?)
The series is adapted from George R.R. Martin’s fake-history tome Fire & Blood, the first volume of which the author put out in 2018 while in the process of studiously not finishing The Winds Of Winter. Bloys noted that that connection to Martin’s existing writing (and its relative temporal closeness to the original Game Of Thrones era) was one of the reasons the prequel moved forward, when another untitled project, starring Naomi Watts and co-developed by Jane Goldman and Martin, was killed by the network late last year. That series took place some 8,000 years before Jon Snow started running around, knowing nothing, and apparently that giant time gap made the whole thing a lot harder for HBO execs to wrap their head around:
That [prequel] was 8,000 years before the current show, so it required a lot more invention. One of the benefits of House Of The Dragon is there was a text from George and there was a little bit more of a roadmap. [Goldman’s prequel] did have more challenges in terms of establishing a world, but I think she handled that beautifully… there wasn’t one glaring thing.”
Fire & Blood tracks the rise of the temperamentally unstable Targaryen family, as they use a bunch of giant lizard-shaped WMDs to seize control of Westeros and wage civil wars among themselves. The book kicks off a mere 3 centuries before the era of Game Of Thrones, a completely relatable span of time that is obviously far easier for an audience to grasp and understand than something taking place in the distant past. (Did they even have dragons back then, we idly wonder aloud?). House Of The Dragon is being created by, and will be showrun by, Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal.