The last season of Game of Thrones is over, for better or worse, but HBO and George R.R. Martin have been hard at work planning for the future of the franchise. And it appears that it will possibly involve a spin-off series that is focused on House Targaryen.
We’ve known that HBO is planning more Game of Thrones since before the series ended, but only one of those shows has been confirmed — a series that takes place thousands of years before Thrones during the Age of Heroes. However, Deadline is now reporting that HBO is nearing an order on a second spin-off series to pilot. The project is reportedly based on Martin’s book Fire & Blood, which details the history of the Targaryen family 300 years before Thrones as they struggle to hold on to power. An idea for adapting the book had been pitched by Thrones writer/producer Bryan Cogman in the past but wasn’t picked up. He moved on, but evidently the idea stuck.
Martin and Ryan Condal will co-produce the show, which will have a long trek to becoming a series. The trend with major streaming channels is to order shows straight to series, but despite the fact that WarnerMedia’s HBO Max is a streaming platform, HBO is still committed to the more traditional pilot process. That means the show creators will make a pilot, if ordered, for the series, and if it piques enough interest we’ll get the full series ordered afterward.
Fire & Blood as a book has a couple issues with it as well. The first is that it has a second volume that isn’t finished, but neither is the Game of Thrones series and that didn’t stop Martin from making the show. The second is that, unlike the Game of Throne novels, it’s more of a historical tome than an engaging story (think The Silmarillion vs. The Lord of the Rings). Adapting its centuries’ worth of material is going to be quite the challenge unless they change the story a lot or take a drastically different approach to the show. Everything is in such early stages that we won’t know anything for sure until much later, and that’s contingent on the pilot even getting ordered.
