New edition of Fire & Blood hints at House of the Dragon release date?

2022 is going to be a huge year for fantasy television. With Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and HBO’s Game of Thrones successor show House of the Dragon both slated to hit screens this year, this could very well be the biggest year for these types of shows since Thrones ended back in 2019.

However, while The Rings of Power has had a solid release date for a long time (September 2), we still don’t know when to expect House of the Dragon. We’ve had a few exciting updates on that front in the past week, like HBO programming president Casey Bloys confirming that the show was finished filming and George R.R. Martin offering his opinion on when we might get to see it. But we don’t have an official date.

However, we do have another interesting bit of news that could shed some light on a potential release window. Los Siete Reinos reports that Penguin Random House is releasing a new edition of Martin’s book Fire & Blood, which is the book that House of the Dragon is based on. The new edition is expected to have a TV tie-in cover for House of the Dragon.

New TV tie-in edition of Fire & Blood coming on July 12

The new edition of Fire & Blood is due out on July 12, which happens to be the 11-year anniversary of the release of A Dance with Dragons, the latest book in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. That’s notable by itself, but we’re interested in how it may relate to House of the Dragon.

Fire & Blood is the first volume of Martin’s fake historical compendium about the Targaryen dynasty. Much of it details the Dance of the Dragons, a brutal civil war that be the main subject of House of the Dragon. So might we see the show premiere around the same time that the book comes out?

We do have a pretty recent example of how tie-in novels can set the stage for TV shows. For instance, Disney revealed that Obi-Wan Kenobi book and comic tie-ins were coming in May before it revealed that the new Obi-Wan Kenobi show was premiering on May 25. Granted, Disney’s situation is a bit different because it both airs the show and publishes the tie-in books, but it’s still interesting.

In the past, tie-in editions for the various Game of Thrones books were released anywhere from one to three weeks before the premiere of their respective seasons. There is no guarantee at all that Fire & Blood will follow this pattern…but it’s definitely worth noting that this tie-in edition is coming in mid-summer. It means at the very least that we are unlikely to see House of the Dragon before then.

House of the Dragon could be premiering this summer

As for whether we’ll see it later in the summer, that gets a bit more complicated. Casey Bloys confirmed that Westworld season 4 will be airing sometime in the summer, and HBO does not typically let its huge tentpole shows overlap. This makes a fall release date for House of the Dragon more likely than ever. It’s entirely possible that the new edition of Fire & Blood is being released on July 12 to line up with the A Dance with Dragons anniversary, in which case it would serve as an extended early promotion for House of the Dragon, which would air a couple of months later.

We’re on the lookout for any news regarding House of the Dragon. As soon as we know when it’s coming, we’ll be sounding a horn from the top of the Wall to let everyone know about it. (How many more of these metaphors can I come up with? You’ll just have to keep reading to find out.)

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