With just over a month left until the premiere of the highly-anticipated Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon, secrets are spilling out of HBO’s vault. And we’re not just talking about House of the Dragon secrets here; in his latest deep dive for The Hollywood Reporter, longtime Game of Thrones reporter James Hibberd gave us a detailed account of the race to find the right spinoff series to follow-up HBO’s game-changing hit.
Dubbed “The War of the Five Pitches” within HBO, this quest for a suitable successor to Game of Thrones began during production of the latter seasons of that original show. And HBO didn’t just choose one idea to develop; it had several things cooking at once. “I wanted to give ourselves every chance of success,” HBO programming president Casey Bloys said. “You don’t want to say, ‘We’re going to replace the biggest show of all time and it’s all going to rest on one script.’”
We already know about many of these proposed spinoffs, including The Tales of Dunk & Egg; a show about Corlys Velaryon called Sea Snake; and 10,000 Ships, about the journey of the warrior queen Nymeria. Then there was Bloodmoon, the prequel series about the origins of the White Walkers which starred Naomi Watts, Miranda Richardson, and Jamie Campbell Bower. That one filmed a pilot that reportedly cost upward of $30 million before HBO canceled it.
But there were spinoffs in development we didn’t know about. After George R.R. Martin pitched the first two spinoff concepts — The Tales of Dunk & Egg, based on his beloved novellas; and the concept for House of the Dragon (which was originally titled The Dance of the Dragons) — HBO decided to heavily research the author’s catalog for other ideas. Around 15 possible prequel concepts were drawn from Martin’s fictional worlds. “We tried everything,” Bloys said. “There were no ideas too weird.”
Except that a few of them were.
Game of Thrones meets The Avengers meets Catholicism
Obviously, 15 is quite a few more spinoffs than ever made it into the news cycle. The Jon Snow sequel series, for example, is one of the ideas that had been in development for just as long as most of the other spinoffs, but was only reported on very recently.
Now we know about a few others that got the axe pretty early on. The strangest by far was an Avengers-style team up series about the Seven Gods of Westeros…where they were literal people who walked the land. So think a Father, Smith, Warrior, Mother, Maiden, Crone, and Stranger all doing their thing, helping out the citizens of Westeros and going on adventures. Apparently, it would have shown how they all came to be worshipped as gods. “That didn’t get very far,” one insider told THR.
I think we can all agree that that series sounds like a horrible idea…and yet, I now can’t stop imagining what it would have been like. It’s probably for the best that we’ll never know.
Another spinoff that was considered revolved around the destruction of ancient Valyria, with Kong: Skull Island writer Max Borenstein attached to develop it. And yet another newly revealed spinoff that was considered would have been about the original Aegon Targaryen’s conquest of Westeros. That one was being written by Rand Ravich and Far Shariat (The Astronaut’s Wife). According to THR, the script for that series portrayed Aegon as a “drunken lout” akin to William the Conqueror.
When the dust settled, House of the Dragon was the victor and next claimant to the Iron Throne. We’ll see how it does when it premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21.
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