From the masterminds who brought you eight seasons of Game of Thrones come, well we’re not sure just yet! News recently broke that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (known mostly as David and Dan round these parts) have officially signed their next global deal. After a lengthy courting process which included bidders from Comcast, Disney, Amazon, and Apple, they ultimately set their sights and signed their pens with the hottest ticket in global TV. No, it wasn’t with HBO, though you’d certainly not be wrong for guessing that, given their decade-long recently concluded residence at the WarnerMedia-owned hub. It would appear that they have ultimately decided to take up residency at Netflix. So what’s cooking for them over at the ‘ol streaming site? Let’s see if we can figure that out…
We’ve had a beautiful run with HBO for more than a decade and we’re grateful to everyone there for always making us feel at home. Over the past few months we’ve spent many hours talking to Cindy Holland and Peter Friedlander, as well as Ted Sarandos and Scott Stuber. We remember the same shots from the same ‘80s movies; we love the same books; we’re excited about the same storytelling possibilities. Netflix has built something astounding and unprecedented, and we’re honored they invited us to join them.
Sources tell Deadline that David and Dan’s deal might be in the 9-figure range, worth as much as $300 million, and rumored to span 5 years. So this begs the question: Is that 5 years’ worth of varied content? Or 5 seasons of a single show? We don’t have too much to go off of. Over the last couple of years, Netflix has pooled its money behind major talents such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, but each of them is well known for producing multiple shows on television, often overseeing them from afar, with no more than an executive producer credit slapped on to many episodes of their shows. That’s not to say that their mark is any less evident, but I want to specify that it’s not an apples to apples comparison if we’re using this to try and figure out what David and Dan are up to. D&D were not just executive producers, but the writers, showrunners, and even sometimes directors of GOT, so this could suggest that the rumored $300 million is more than likely to be for one show they can focus their attention on. Would it be another high fantasy to compete with the HBO’s upcoming GOT spinoff, Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time, or Showtime’s upcoming Kingkiller Chronicles, or one of the other 800 zillion other ‘high fantasy prestige drama’ that are innumerably upcoming? Who knows?
We do know a few things, however. We know that D&D will have their time occupied for quite a while, given the next Star Wars movie following this December’s Episode IX will be theirs, and also that it will be the first of a trilogy. So this begs the question of how involved they will be able to get with their Netflix project(s). Amidst all this speculation, my ultimate guess is that they will fall into the aforementioned roles of overall executive producers, where they will oversee multiple projects, and won’t have to spend day to day on any one set (other than their Star Wars trilogy, where I expect them to fully be in charge).
Of course, your guess is as good as mine, and I’d love to hear what it is. What say you?
