We can most likely expect House of the Dragon, the new Game of Thrones spinoff, in 2022, reports Deadline, who spoke to HBO President of Programming Casey Bloys today at the winter TCAs. The date was far from set in stone, but it’s the most firm news we’ve received in some time about the show.
“My guess is sometime in 2022,” Bloys said, with Deadline reporting he indicated it was “too early to be more specific.”
George RR Martin dished on the writers room of the spinoff back in November, confirming the involvement of Wes Tooke, Claire Kiechel, and Ti Mikkel, along with co-showunner Ryan Condal who is penning the pilot with Martin.
“They are starting writing,” Bloys confirmed, along with the news that there IS no casting news yet. He teased, “Obviously it’s a big, complicated show.”
In the interview, Bloys did take time to explain the failed pilot Blood Moon, written by Jane Goldman and starring Naomi Watts. Bloys explained to Deadline:
“In development, in pilots, sometimes things come together, sometimes they don’t,” he explained. “One of the things I think Jane took on beautifully, which was a challenge, there was a lot more world creation because she set hers 8,000 years before the (mothership) show, so it required a lot more. That is a big swing. One of the things about House of Dragons, there is a text, there is a book so that made it a little bit more of a road map for a series order.”
“I think Jane did a beautiful job, it was a big challenge but there was nothing that I would point to and say, oh, that one element did not work, just overall it did not quite gel. That’s one of the reasons when we started out to think about ‘Is there a life after Game of Thrones in terms of Game of Thrones’, we purposefully developed multiple projects. We would have been very lucky to do one pilot, have that pilot go and be a success but in development as you know, it takes a lot of tries to get it right, this is no different.”
Also coming out of the TCAs is the confirmation that David Benioff and DB Weiss’ follow-up show for the network called Confederate is officially dead. The controversial drama was announced a couple years as the next exciting step for the duo, but fans rightly pointed out that it was a really really terrible idea. It was commonly assumed to be not happening since D&D moved onto Netflix and other projects but now it’s confirmed: it’s history.
