George R.R. Martin was initially against the new Game of Thrones spinoffs

HBO is developing Game of Thrones spinoff shows about Robert’s Rebellion and Tales of Dunk and Egg! But George R.R. Martin didn’t want that. What changed?

The other day, we learned that HBO was in early development on not one but several Game of Thrones spinoff shows, and this is in addition to House of the Dragon, the one they’re already making. The network is considering adapting George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg, a (comparatively) light-hearted adventure set around 90 years before the original show. It’s also working on a series about Robert’s Rebellion, that war that put Robert Baratheon on the Iron Throne a mere decade and change before we catch up with him on Game of Thrones. And it sounds like there could be more.

This news inspires a lot of feelings: obviously I’m excited at the prospect of visiting Westeros again, but also worried that HBO will overexpose the world of Game of Thrones in an attempt to chase the success Disney has had with Marvel and Star Wars.

I’m also curious about how we got here, because this was not always the plan. HBO first announced that it was looking into making Game of Thrones spinoffs in 2017, when the original series was winding up for its big finish. It hired several writers to develop pitches, and ended up choosing one to go forward: Blood Moon, a show about the origins of the White Walkers.

They actually made a pilot for that show, but for whatever reason didn’t end up ordering it to series. Focus then shifted to House of the Dragon, another of the original pitches, which will be about a brutal Targaryen civil war that happened over 100 years before the original show.

What’s interesting is that neither Dunk and Egg not Robert’s Rebellion were among those original pitches. George R.R. Martin explained why in a blog post shortly after the spinoff hunt was announced. Of Dunk and Egg, he wrote:

"We’re not doing Dunk & Egg. Eventually, sure, I’d love that, and so would many of you. But I’ve only written and published three novellas to date, and there are at least seven or eight or ten more I want to write. We all know how slow I am, and how fast a television show can move. I don’t want to repeat what happened with GAME OF THRONES itself, where the show gets ahead of the books. When the day comes that I’ve finished telling all my tales of Dunk & Egg, then we’ll do a tv show about them… but that day is still a long ways off."

Ryan Condal, the showrunner behind House of the Dragon, basically confirmed this idea when we talked to him last October:

"I very passionately pitched Dunk and Egg as a spinoff idea, because I thought that’s a great way to go…HBO loves Dunk and Egg, they desperately love it, but George really wants to finish writing those stories before that’s adapted, I think he wants to be a little more involved with that."

And of Robert’s Rebellion, he wrote:

"We’re not doing Robert’s Rebellion either. I know thousands of you want that, I know there’s a petition… but by the time I finish writing A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, you will know every important thing that happened in Robert’s Rebellion. There would be no surprises or revelations left in such a show, just the acting out of conflicts whose resolutions you already know. That’s not a story I want to tell just now; it would feel too much like a twice-told tale."

It’s true that those two series are among the ones fans most wanted to see. The Dunk and Egg stories are tailor-made for TV: they’re episodic, a little friendlier than Game of Thrones, and have excellent (if incomplete) source material. And Robert’s Rebellion would give us a chance to see younger versions of our favorite Game of Thrones characters, which would be a lot of fun.

But Martin seemed pretty firm that neither of them were happening…except they are. What changed?

We don’t know for sure, but I have a pretty good guess: in 2018, HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia was acquired by AT&T. For a long time, HBO was known as a network that valued quality over quantity, the kind of network that might honor Martin’s request to not adapt Dunk and Egg or Robert’s Rebellion in the name of maintaining a good working relationship with him. But from the start, AT&T made clear that it was going to focus more on the bottom line. Whenever HBO makes a move that seems a little too money-grubbing, I always think of this exchange between longtime HBO CEO Richard Plepler and AT&T executive John Stankey, which happened at an HBO town hall meeting shortly after the acquisition:

"Stankey: “[W]e’ve got to make money at the end of the day, right?”Plepler: “We do that.”Stankey: “Yes, you do. Just not enough.”"

Plepler, for the record, resigned as CEO of HBO a few months after this.

My bet is that AT&T, eager to provide content for its streaming service HBO Max so it could compete with Disney and Netflix, leaned on HBO to monetize the Game of Thrones franchise to an extent the network wasn’t considering before, so now we have shows like Dunk and Egg and Robert’s Rebellion even though they weren’t initially on the table. For better or worse, Game of Thrones is going to go the route of Star Wars and Marvel; I imagine we’ll see multiple Game of Thrones shows on the air in a few years time.

And that might be amazing! But I also worry it will dilute things and spread creative resources too thin.

I also worry that Martin isn’t on board with any of this. AT&T and WarnerMedia have made it clear they’re more than willing to tick off their creative partners to make more money, as evidenced by how many big-name directors were mad at them for deciding to release all of their 2021 movies straight to HBO Max without being consulted. And I can’t help but notice that Martin himself has been dead quiet about all of these announcements, both the news about Dunk and Egg/Robert’s Rebellion and about House of the Dragon. Today he posted something about his Wild Cards book series, not the enormous news that his beloved creations are going to be adapted for TV. It brings to mind the old saying: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

Obviously this is guesswork on my part; I don’t know the man. There could be lots of reasons he doesn’t want to weigh in, and for HBO to even consider making a Dunk and Egg show, he would have had to sold them the rights to the stories sometime between now and 2014, when he wrote on the topic. But the silence is notable.

I’m sure we’ll get more details soon enough. It’s no doubt an exciting time to be a Game of Thrones fan. Let’s hope the excitement is borne out.

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