House of the Dragon boss “not too worried” about The Lord of the Rings

HBO and HBO Max chief content officer Casey Bloys recently sat down with Vulture to discuss the company’s new streaming service, which after a rocky start has rebounded to the tune of some 70 million subscribers, helped out by a string of buzzy originals and HBO shows (The Flight Attendant, Mare of Easttown, new seasons of Succession and Curb Your Enthusiasm) and the fact that WarnerMedia released all of its 2021 movies straight to the service. However it happened, HBO Max has been a success.

And the company is looking to double down in 2022. One of the biggest guns in its arsenal is House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel series set around 200 years before the original. The show will cover the Dance of the Dragons, a brutal Targaryen civil war that tore Westeros apart.

There’s no release date for House of the Dragon yet, and while it’s due out next year, I wouldn’t expect it towards the start. “[P]roduction is not wrapped,” Bloys said. “I was there last week visiting [showrunners] Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik on the set. I’ve seen enough to feel very good and very happy.”

House of the Dragon will come out in a year when fantasy shows are everywhere. Amazon has The Wheel of Time on right now, Netflix is about to drop the second season of The Witcher, and Amazon is pouring a ton of money into a Lord of the Rings to drop next September. Bloys, playing it cool, simply said that, “I’m not too worried about what anybody else is doing at this point.”

How many Game of Thrones prequels will HBO make?

It’s true that HBO has always forged its own path, but market forces are what they are, and everyone in the industry is bending to certain headwinds. For instance, after Marvel had such success with the MCU, everyone is trying to create their own cinematic universe. House of the Dragon is the only Game of Thrones spinoff officially in production, but HBO is at least mulling others. Might the network ever go full Marvel, with multiple new shows a year?

“The way that we have approached Game of Thrones is wanting to get it right,” Bloys said. “So we certainly have other things in development and things that we feel good about. But right now, the only thing that is green-lit and coming is House of the Dragon. That’s not to say there will not be other things, but we’re in the process of developing and seeing what feels like the best edition.”

"It really depends on how good the scripts are. I would rather take it from a qualitative standpoint and react to the scripts as opposed to an artificial number of series that we need on the air."

That sounds like the right approach to me. I hope that HBO’s history of restraint will win out and that the Game of Thrones universe won’t begin too ungainly and big, but with the industry in a fervor over cinematic universes, we’re definitely getting something. I just hope they know where to draw the line.

Still no Harry Potter show in development

Bloys also weighed in on a couple of other HBO Max-related topics. For instance, earlier this year it was rumored that the service was developing a Harry Potter show, but apparently they were exaggerated. Months later, nothing’s changed:

"There are no updates on it. Like we talked about, the IP — that world — is really exciting, and people love it. It would be wonderful to do that. But there is nothing — no series to report. When there is, I will let you know. But nothing to report on that."

Overall, Bloys says that HBO Max is here to stay. “[M]y hope is that, a year from now, we’re cementing our place as one of the must-have services. Because we’re all in this race to end up as one of the top streaming services. It is a race. Not everybody’s going to survive, and my hope is that our programming makes us one of the must-haves.”

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