HBO may halted development of Game of Thrones prequels The Sea Snake and 10,000 Ships.
HBO has had a winding road finding a successor to Game of Thrones. We finally got a prequel series with last year’s House of the Dragon, but that’s only one of several series the network was considering. There’s one based on George R.R. Martin’s Dunk & Egg novellas, one that Kit Harington is developing about the further adventures of Jon Snow, a prequel about House of the Dragon character Corlys Velaryon, one about the warrior queen Nymeria and her people’s pilgrimage to Dorne, an animated show about Yi Ti, another animated show we know nothing about, and even a stage play about the tourney at Harrenhal.
That’s quite a lot, and we didn’t even count Blood Moon, which HBO canned after making a full pilot. But according to a new report from Game of Thrones fan site Los Siete Reinos, that list may now be two shows shorter: they’ve discovered evidence that points to the possibility that HBO has decided to shelve both The Sea Snake and 10,000 Ships, the shows about Corlys Velaryon and Princess Nymeria respectively.
Has HBO pulled the plug on two of its Game of Thrones spinoffs?
HBO has been developing a lot of potential spinoff series, but we were never likely to see all or even most of them. But it wasn’t until a blog update from George R.R. Martin amidst all the shakeups at HBO’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery last year that we started getting hints that some of those shows may have been set permanently aside:
"Some of [the spinoffs] are moving faster than others, as is always the case with development. None have been greenlit yet, though we are hoping… maybe soon. A couple have been shelved, but I would not agree that they are dead. You can take something off the shelf as easily as you can put it on the shelf. All the changes at HBO Max have impacted us, certainly."
So we knew that the shake-ups had “impacted” HBO’s various Game of Thrones spinoffs, but we didn’t know which ones. It’s here that fans start sleuthing. Eagle-eyed Reddit user u/Zionius_ noticed an intriguing change on the website for Startling, Inc., the production company run by George R.R. Martin’s frequent collaborator Vince Gerardis. Gerardis and his company have had a hand in basically all of the recent screen projects that Martin is involved in, from Game of Thrones to House of the Dragon to Dark Winds on AMC. They have most of Martin’s in-development projects listed as well, including The Ice Dragon, Wild Cards, Dunk & Egg and more.
According to the detectives on Reddit, this site also had 10,000 Ships and The Sea Snake listed up until a couple of days ago, when they were suddenly pulled from the site.
Out of all Martin’s film projects, the main ones that aren’t listed are the Jon Snow series (probably because it isn’t technically confirmed yet; remember, HBO still hasn’t issued any sort of official statement about it), and the two animated series in development. They even have the Harrenhal play on the list. This makes the sudden disappearance of 10,000 Ships and Sea Snake more than a little suspicious.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story as it develops, but for now, there’s good reason to think that our next outing in Westeros may not involve Corlys Velaryon or Princess Nymeria. Although Corlys will feature in the second season of House of the Dragon, coming in 2024.
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