Warner Bros. Developing a “Game of Thrones” Film
Warner Bros. has been quietly developing a movie based on George R.R. Martin’s juggernaut fantasy series that set HBO on fire for eight seasons and has been parlayed into a successful spinoff series, House of the Dragon. The news broke late last week and marked the first time the series had been launched on the big screen. There’s already one successful spinoff series unfolding on HBO—House of the Dragon—centered on the internal strife within the powerful Hosue Targaryen and set around 172 years before the events depicted in Game of Thrones. Another series, based on Martin’s “Dunk & Egg” novella, is set to become A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, centered on the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk) and young Aegon V Targaryen (Egg), which is set 90 years before the events in Martin’s most iconic work, “A Song of Fire and Ice,” which is the series that spawned GoT. But this would be the first feature film the studio has made from Martin’s deliciously rich fantasy world, and there’s word that it might also be the first to be set after the events in the flagship series.
The Hollywood Reporter scooped that the film project is in the very early stages of development, without a director, cast, or writer yet attached. Yet the studio is serious about bringing Martin’s brawling, sprawling, bloodthirsty Westerosi denizens onto the silver screen. This wouldn’t be far afield for Warner Bros. when you consider that Martin and the co-creators of Game of Thrones, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, were all interested in exploring Game of Thrones as a feature film. Weiss and Benioff’s idea was to conclude their series with a film trilogy rather than the 8th season that aired in 2019. At the time, HBO wanted to keep Game of Thrones firmly saddled on the small screen.
The landscape has changed since Game of Thrones concluded on May 19, 2019, with new folks at the top of the TV and film division (Casey Bloys heads HBO, while the film studio is led by Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca), with films now begetting series, like Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Warner Bros’s own The Batman spinning off into HBO’s beloved The Penguin. Warner Bros. also has another spinoff just about to premiere; Dune: Prophecy is about to arrive on November 17, derived from Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed Dune and Dune: Part II but set thousands of years before the rise of House Atreides.
While there are more Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works for the small screen, they’ve all been set before the original series, and there’s a chance the film project could be set after the traumatic conclusion to the action, which saw Kit Harrington’s Jon Snow turning on Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen to save the Seven Kingdoms. What do the Seven Kingdoms look like in the aftermath of the epic battle with the Night King and Dany’s fall from power? Not even George R. R. Martin has told us that.
Featured image: Season 8, episode 1 (debut 4/14/19): Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke.
photo: HBO
