Everything we know about HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff shows

The Game of Thrones franchise is getting a new entry on Warner Bros. Discovery’s newly-announced Max streaming service. The new prequel, called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: the Hedge Knight, has been rumored for some time, but it wasn’t clear which part of the ample Game of Thrones lore it would borrow from.

At today’s HBO Max rebranding event, HBO head Casey Bloys confirmed that the new show has been ordered straight to series and would focus on Dunk and Egg. In the world of Game of Thrones, Dunk is a famous knight, and Egg is his squire, both of whom travel the land righting wrongs.

In its earliest episodes, House of the Dragon sometimes stumbled and often felt like a project that owed its existence to HBO’s hunger for a new hit rather than an understanding of what made Game of Thrones compelling in the first place. But in its season 1 finale, House of the Dragon proved itself to be a worthy Game of Thrones successor and something kind of like a dragon egg — a surprising gift that needed time, heat, and just the right kind of intensity to become truly fantastic.

Game of Thrones had the luxuries of time, space, and novelty working in its favor when it first premiered back in 2011 and introduced a new audience to the Song of Ice and Fire that’s been playing in George R.R. Martin’s mind for the past three decades. Though it took a while for its impact to become clear, Game of Thrones focused on gradually revealing more and more of its characters’ interior selves with a measured slowness that made it easy to empathize with them — especially as the shape of Westeros’ politics became clear. By doing that, Game of Thrones cultivated its cast of incestuous, murderous, treasonous child defenestrators into a group of people audiences loved and wanted to see survive in the great war against the frozen dead, even though the series had lost much of its luster by that point.

Things got dark on House of the Dragon last night as characters stole dragons and other characters made super incestuous life choices. And all of it was done under the cover of darkness, leading many viewers wondering if their TVs were busted.

But your TV is not busted. Your TV is a victim of the episode’s director, Miguel Sapochnik. The man can presumably see in the dark because this is the second time he’s directed an episode in the Game of Thrones franchise cast in such darkness people questioned their own eyes.

Though House of the Dragon’s only just premiered, HBO’s already making it quite clear that the Game of Thrones prequel is here to stay, at least for a while.

Today, HBO announced that Ryan Condal and George R.R. Martin’s House of the Dragon has been renewed for a second season of stories all about Westeros’ infamous family of inbred dragon riders. In a statement about the renewal, HBO executive vice president of programming Francesca Orsi sang House of the Dragon’s praises and expressed confidence in the ability of the creative team behind the show to tell compelling stories.

Despite glitches for some people trying to watch via Fire TV Sticks, HBO announced that the first episode of its Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon recorded the network’s biggest premiere of all time, recording 9.986 million viewers across linear and HBO Max streaming on Sunday night in the US alone.

The original Game of Thrones series closed out its run with 13.7 million live viewers on linear channels for the finale in 2019, clocking over 19 million views with the addition of streaming and video-on-demand numbers. According to HBO, ahead of the Dragon premiere, interest in the original series — with the entire series now available for streaming in 4K on HBO Max — spiked, drawing a weekly average in streaming for August that was up 90 percent in July.

Besides unreleased and disappearing content, there have been plenty of complaints about the HBO Max streaming apps since they launched. Still, they’ve generally held up well under the stress of premieres for content like Tenet, Wonder Woman, The Matrix, or Westworld, but for HBO there may not be anything like a Game of Thrones premiere.

Tonight’s debut of the show’s spinoff, House of the Dragon, is the first taste of a new GOT experience inside HBO Max, and while many people trying to stream the premiere episode are watching without a problem, others said the app crashed on them, or froze up once it got past the pre-show teaser trailer.

House of the Dragon, HBO Max’s new Game of Thrones prequel from Ryan Condal and George R.R. Martin, is a series that understands how fascinating it can be when epic fantasies explore the idea of history rhyming with itself across space and time. But in its attempt to enrich the world of A Song of Ice and Fire by echoing the narrative melodies that shaped Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon falls into the trap of retreading ground that’s beyond familiar and mistakenly assuming that its connections to a larger franchise are enough to make it interesting.

Set some 172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen, House of the Dragon tells the complicated, horrific, and often petty tale of how the Targaryen family’s squabbles over the Iron Throne ultimately led to near-extinction of their entire bloodline and their winged beasts of war. Rather than tackling House Targaryen’s entire genesis in exhaustive detail like Martin’s sprawling novel Fire & Blood, House of the Dragon instead focuses on some of the pivotal moments laid out in The Princess and the Queen, an account of how some of the most powerful families in Westeros became mortal enemies. 

HBO finally dropped a newer and longer trailer for its Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, and you will not be shocked to learn the trailer is full of dragons and also plenty of Targaryens with their tell-tale white blond tresses.

The new show premieres on August 21st on HBO (streaming on HBO Max) and is a prequel set immediately before a civil war spun out of competing heirs in House Targaryen. In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels (and HBO’s Game of Thrones), this civil war spells the end of House Targaryen, which is weakened by the infighting and eventually nearly snuffed out just before Game of Thrones. The series is based on The Dying of the Dragons, a novella found in George R.R. Martin’s 2018 novel, Fire & Blood.

HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon, will debut on HBO and HBO Max on August 21st. The company announced the date Wednesday with a picture of what appears to be a hatching dragon egg — which hopefully means we’ll see at least one of the terrifying beasts in the upcoming show.

House of the Dragon is based on George R.R. Martin’s 2019 book Fire and Blood and is focused on, as the name suggests, House Targaryen. It’s set 200 years before the events of the hugely popular Game of Thrones, which featured Daenerys Targaryen as one of the main characters.

Game of Thrones fans excited for House of the Dragon — the upcoming prequel series HBO announced late last year — should prepare to settle in for a bit of a wait. According to HBO’s president of programming Casey Bloys, the series likely won’t air until “sometime in 2022,” via Deadline.

Bloys wouldn’t offer any more details than that, save to say that writing for the series is underway, and that there were no casting details to announce yet. He also emphasized that despite the fact that HBO had several other Game of Thrones successors in the works, all focus right now is on House of the Dragon. “There are no other blinking green lights or anything like that,” Bloys told Deadline. “Sometime down the road who knows, but there are no immediate plans. We are all focusing on House of the Dragon.”

HBO has ordered a Game of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon, straight to series.

The new prequel is written by Ryan Condal (Colony), with George R.R. Martin set to co-executive produce. The project is based on Martin’s 2019 book Fire and Blood, and is a history of House Targaryen (the ancestors of Daenerys) as they fight through a civil war. The 10-episode project is set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones.

HBO’s first Game of Thrones spinoff reportedly isn’t moving past the pilot stage, according to a report from Deadline. The prequel, which shot a pilot over the summer starring Naomi Watts and written by showrunner Jane Goldman, was set “thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones” and would have portrayed “the world’s descent from the golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour.”

Deadline doesn’t give a direct reason for HBO’s decision not to proceed with a series order, but it does note that there were rumors of issues during the filming of the pilot over the summer. That echoes stories that the original Game of Thrones had a terrible pilot, which was wildly different from the final version that ended up on-screen. HBO reportedly had to reshoot more than 90 percent of the episode before it aired, kicking off the cultural juggernaut the series eventually became.

HBO’s Game of Thrones is inching towards the end of its run, with just three episodes remaining. The network isn’t abandoning Westeros just yet, though — it has a handful of additional shows in development, and on his blog, George R.R. Martin offered up a short update.

In 2017, Martin revealed that there were five spinoff shows (he says he prefers to call them successors, rather than spinoffs) in the works at HBO. In his latest blog post, Martin notes that of those five, “three of them are still moving forward nicely.” HBO has ordered a pilot for one of them — which Martin says he isn’t supposed to call The Long Night) set thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones. It’s expected to start shooting sometime this summer, with S.J. Clarkson (Defenders, Jessica Jones) set to direct.

HBO is beginning to plot what comes after Game of Thrones when it concludes next year. The network has been working on succession plans for the show for over a year, with five potential projects in the works, and it just ordered a pilot for one of them: a prequel that takes place thousands of years before the present show, from series author George R.R. Martin and Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service writer Jane Goldman.

“Only one thing is for sure: from the horrifying secrets of Westeros’ history to the true origin of the White Walkers, the mysteries of the East to the Starks of legend… it’s not the story we think we know,” reads HBO’s log line for the project.

With Game of Thrones now heading for its final two short seasons, HBO is deeply invested in how to follow up the biggest show in its stable. Variety reported two weeks ago that the network had tapped four writers to work on follow-ups to the acclaimed series, setting the fandom alight with theories about what parts of George R.R. Martin’s backstory to his A Song of Ice and Fire series could conceivably make it to the screen. Could there be a series about Robert’s Rebellion, the war that gave rise to the world of the show? What about a series set in the ancient past? The Thrones universe is massive, so fans had plenty of exciting ideas to chew on.

Last night, Martin stepped in to set the record straight, writing on his blog that a fifth writer will be involved in HBO’s process. He also wrote definitively that Robert’s Rebellion, Martin’s Dunk and Egg prequel novellas, and stories about side characters wouldn’t be adapted for television. (Sorry, anyone holding out for a Lady Stoneheart miniseries!)

George R.R. Martin did some Sunday night Livejournal blogging yesterday, addressing his involvement in four in-development Game of Thrones spinoffs recently announced by HBO. Uncommonly for Martin, who loves to tease fans with vague promises about the long-awaited sixth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, the post contained some useful and specific information.

For starters, there are now five spinoffs in development, though Martin said he wouldn’t name the fifth writer. The only hint he added was that the writer is a “great guy and a fine writer” and he loves the world of Westeros a lot.