HBO Kills One ‘Game Of Thrones’ Prequel, Replaces It With Another, ‘House Of The Dragon’

It has been a wild 48 hours for Game of Thrones fans, as in that span of time we have:

1) Disney and Game of Thrones showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff parting ways over a future Star Wars trilogy

2) HBO killing off the most well-known in development Game of Thrones prequel, which starred Naomi Watts and already had a pilot and expansive cast.

3) HBO announcing that they were still in the Game of Thrones business after all, revealing a different Game of Thrones prequel called House of the Dragon.

You might be able to guess what this new series is about as yes, it’s a prequel that will focus on House Targaryen. It will be about the ancestors of Daenerys, set some 300 years before the events of the original series. This is different than the other prequel series which reportedly took place in Valyria many thousands of years before the main show, before that part of the world was destroyed, and it too was supposedly meant to be a Targaryen prequel in some fashion, though the exact nature of how that would have worked will probably now never be fully known.

A big difference between the now-dead prequel and the new one, House of the Dragon, is that HBO has ordered the latter straight to a 10 episode series, while the former only got a pilot, and wasn’t picked up from there. Another big component is that House of the Dragon is supposed to be some sort of adaption of Fire and Blood, George RR Martin’s generation-spanning account of the Targaryen dynasty, which is not told in traditional, one-timeline format like A Song of Ice and Fire. But while House of the Dragon may incorporate a lot of the lore and framework from the book, it’s unclear just how much help Martin can be here, as it will have to be fleshed out with a lot of material he hasn’t written. Naturally, like everything he’s written for the series, even Fire and Blood remains unfinished, as Martin is planning a second volume of it for some unspecified time in the future.

Looking back on the recently killed prequel series, in addition to Naomi Watts, we also knew of a full 15 other cast members attached to that series. But as of right now, we don’t know of any actors involved with House of the Dragon. This series was announced as part of an HBO Max presentation, Time Warner’s streaming play that blends HBO content with…a lot of other random stuff, but it seems likely it will be also available to traditional HBO subscribers.

If we’re basing our knowledge on Martin’s books, Fire and Blood kicks off with Aegon Targaryen the First arriving in Westeros and conquering six of the seven kingdoms with the help of his wives (and sisters, of course), so it stands to reason he could be our “Ned Stark” of the series to some extent. Or our Tywin Lannister? It’s not really clear how exactly the Targaryens are going to be portrayed in the series, though there will probably be some shades of grey on all sides.

It seems like a somewhat good idea to perhaps stay closer than 10,000 years in the past to the original series, back when we will at least hear the names of houses we recognize from the books and show. No doubt HBO will start drip-feeding us information on this series as time goes on, now that it’s the prequel they’re running with, though we don’t yet know when it will air. Stay tuned.

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