Game of Thrones has finished filming forever. The show has been a boon to the economy of Northern Ireland, where much of the filming takes place. NI Screen, Northern Ireland’s film and television commission, has invented around £16m ($20 million) of public money into the show over the course of its eight seasons, and seen an estimated return of £210m ($275 million). But it’s now looking at a future without the show.
But given the show’s popularity, it should pay out benefits for years to come. Speaking to BBC News, NI Screen head Richard Williams said he expects Game of Thrones to “live on in Northern Ireland for at least another 10 years.” And that’s without taking into account HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series, set thousands of years before the main series during the Age of Heroes. Naturally, Williams is hoping HBO stays on for that project. “Game of Thrones is still occupying Titanic Studios and I can’t really think about what might replace them in Titanic Studios until they leave,” he said. “I don’t want them to leave and who knows they may not. I can’t say too much, but it is in the public domain that they have ambitions to have spin-off content likely to be a prequel in terms of the storytelling, so who knows? They are still there for now.”
If HBO does decide to vacate Titanic Studios, NI Screen may have to go back to the drawing board. As Williams explained, “in many ways Game of Thrones is irreplaceable.”
It was the single cultural juggernaut of its time – it entirely redefined the making of high-end TV. That can’t be replaced, but the market for that high-end content is huge and it’s only going to get bigger as Amazon ramps up, as Facebook ramps up.
He’s not wrong, on any count. Game of Thrones may have been a singular show, but it’s also inspired competitors like Amazon to take monster swings for the fences with shows based on The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time, while Netflix goes all in on shows based on The Witcher and The Kingkiller Chronicles. If HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff is a miss, NI Screen will have other chances to fill the hole the mainline show left behind. “So we already have that growing and quite frankly if we can’t sell Titanic Studios – the place that was the home of Game of Thrones, the greatest show of its generation – to future buyers, we may give up and go home,” Williams said.
In the meantime, SyFy is filming the second season of its Superman pre-history show Krypton at Belfast Harbour Studios. That’s hardly a replacement for Thrones, but every little bit helps.
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