No, House of the Dragon isn’t coming out in April

We here at WinterIsComing.net are obviously excited to watch House of the Dragon, HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series. It’s coming this year, although we don’t know exactly when.

But depending on where on the internet you look, you might see people claiming to know. Most recently, a rumor has been going around that House of the Dragon will premiere on April 3, which is around the time new seasons of Game of Thrones generally started.

This rumor gained a lot of juice when the IMDb page for House of the Dragon listed April 3 as the premiere date. (The April 3 date has since been removed.) And I know how exciting this sounds…but it’s not true.

Please don’t shoot the messenger. I refer you to someone with more authority than I: the official Twitter page for HBO Max Brazil, which fielded a question from a fan wondering what the April 3 premiere date on IMDb meant. The official Twitter page’s response? “Significa que todo mundo erra.” In English: “It means that everyone makes mistakes.

IMDb is not right about the House of the Dragon release date

Even without this confirmation, trusting information from IMDb is a perilous business. I’m not sure people realize how easy it is to put fake information on there. A user — any user — can submit information to IMDb. After that, it goes through some arcane process and either gets posted or doesn’t, and false information shows up all the time. If you knew how many times during the original run of Game of Thrones that IMDb listed Michelle Fairley as returning to the show to play Lady Stoneheart…those were frustrating times.

Basically, that period taught me not to trust IMDb for information, and I recommend everyone else follow suit.

When does House of the Dragon premiere?

So if House of the Dragon isn’t coming out in April, when does it come out? The short and disappointing answer is that we don’t know, but we can make some educated guesses.

We know that actor Paddy Considine, who plays King Viserys I Targaryen in the prequel, was still filming material as late as last week. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that means we probably still have a long wait in front of us. While parts of the show are undoubtedly already in post-production, if the whole thing isn’t even done filming, that means there’s a lot of touching up to do.

And this will be a complicated show. House of the Dragon is about a Targaryen civil war that tore Westeros apart some 200 years before the events of the original series. Dragons are still around at this time…lots of them. They will take a while to animate. We’re probably looking at a premiere date in the back half of 2022, and quite possibly the final quarter.

Again, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Perhaps Emily Carey, who plays a younger version of Lady Alicent Hightower on the show, can cheer you up with this playful TikTok about the release date:

If she’s not giving away the release date, I’m certainly not in a place to. When there’s an official release date, we will shout it from the rooftops.

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