Game of Thrones is almost over, but the minds behind it — David Benioff and Dan Weiss — are just getting started. As you might expect for two people who ran such a tremendously successful show, they can pretty much write their own ticket in Hollywood, and starting a few years back, we’ve heard about them getting involved with some interesting projects.
First there was Confederate, an HBO show about an alternate reality where the Civil War was fought to a standstill and slavery still exists in the American south. Benioff and Weiss, who were developing the show with husband-and-wife team Malcolm and Nichelle Spellman, seemed pretty excited for this out of the gate, but the show soon faced a flood of criticism from people who thought it sounded reductive, disrespectful and tone-deaf. HBO admitted that it had “screwed up” the reveal, and we’ve heard barely a peep about Confederate since.
A little later, we heard that Benioff and Weiss would write and produce a new series of Star Wars films for Disney, a much less controversial job. And yet…this was before The Last Jedi received a huge amount of fan backlash, before Solo underperformed at the box office, and before Disney CEO said he was going to scale back Star Wars production a bit. Is it possible their Star Wars movies got put on the chopping block?
According to HBO president Casey Bloys, speaking to TV Line, no. “Dan and David are finishing up the final season [of Game of Thrones] and then they are going to go into the Star Wars universe,” Bloys said. “When they come out of that, I assume they will come back to us.”
[It’s] really up to [Benioff and Weiss]. It’s hard to say to someone, ‘You can’t go do Star Wars. They love it. It’s a childhood dream. They’ll go do that, remember why they love television and come back.
Bloys doesn’t mention the backlash to Confederate, but it’s hard to think it wasn’t a factor. I have my doubts as to whether Confederate will ever get made, but Bloys, at least, seems to think there’s a chance. We’ll see.
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