House of the Dragon “out of production” as HBO figures out a release date

Game of Thrones fans have been waiting a few years now for a follow-up to HBO’s tremendously successful high fantasy series. HBO is working on one — House of the Dragon, which is set some 200 years before the original show — but it’s taken a while.

House of the Dragon will tell the story of a brutal civil war fought between rival factions of the Targaryen family. We know it’s coming out sometime this year, but we still don’t have an exactly release date. At least HBO executive Casey Bloys has now given us a little update, explaining to Deadline that they held back from announcing a solid premiere date in case the pandemic threw off the production schedule. “[Y]ou didn’t know who was going to drop out or if we’re going to have to shut down so we just didn’t want to declare a date and then find ourselves shut down,” he said.

However…things have changed. “Now that we are out of production, I think that we will talk to their guys and figure out what we want to do in terms of announcing a date,” Bloys said. “But I was just trying to make sure that we didn’t come out with a date that we couldn’t meet for something that was out of our control.”

When will House of the Dragon premiere on HBO?

We’ve been seeing numerous crews on the show announcing that they’re done filming the first season. Now that Bloys has said that the show is “out of production,” we can more or less take that as confirmation that shooting has wrapped.

House of the Dragon season 1 will consist of 10 episodes of opulently produced drama, which will include a lot of dragons. That means that HBO will need to do a fair amount of post-production work. In other words, while we’ll get to see the show this year, I wouldn’t expect it anytime in the next couple months.

Another bit of evidence: fans of the House of the Dragon subreddit noticed that GoldDerby, a reputable site focused on awards, didn’t include House of the Dragon on its list of shows eligible for 2022 Emmys. That means that House of the Dragon won’t be premiering until after May.

If I had to guess, I’d expect House of the Dragon to come along deep into the back half of the year. It might even premiere close in time to Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show The Rings of Power. That would make for quite the high fantasy smackdown.

The Last of Us show not coming out in 2022

Bloys also talked a bit about The Last of Us, HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s zombie video game series starring Game of Thrones alums Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. A zombie show might seem a little bandwagon-y for HBO, but if you haven’t played it, The Last of Us is a pretty classy zombie game; like, if HBO is going to do a zombie thing, The Last of Us is the most HBO one they could do.

Unfortunately, we won’t get to see what it’s like this year. “I have seen some early episodes and I’m very excited,” Bloys said. “[Producer] Craig [Mazin] did Chernobyl for us, he is a fantastic writer and director. What I’ve seen looks amazing so I’m excited for it but it will not be in ’22.”

But hey, that’s not so disappointing that an official release date announcement for House of the Dragon won’t make it better, right?

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