The second season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon wrapped up earlier this year. We've known that showrunner Ryan Condal and his team would film the third in 2025, but now we're getting more details from Condal himself, who shared some info on a new episode of his podcast The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of.
"2025 is gonna be utter madness from January like third until deep in the fall when we wrap production," Condal said. "We do [have a start date for production], I don't want to say it because it'll be a thing, but it's first quarter 2025."
So Condal is saying that filming will run from early in 2025 until deep into the fall, which ends on December 20. Previously, we've heard that actual shooting might start sometime around March. Condal mentions that work will pick up around January 3, but that's not necessarily the date when cameras start to roll; as he said, he knows when that is but didn't want to say. I'm betting that serious pre-production will start in early January — sets go up, extras get called, actors rehearse, etc — and shooting will commence a bit later.
Condal also talked about how confident he is about the season to come. "This is the most calm, orderly, and as ready as we’ve been in three seasons of making it," he said. "Part of that is the third season, part of that is the fact that everybody I interact with creatively on a day-to-day basis is back from a previous season." That makes perfect sense; the cast and crew of a show get more comfortable the longer a series has been going, and House of the Dragon has been going for a couple of seasons now.
That said, the second season of the show wasn't as warmly received as the first. There are a lot of reasons for that; a lot of fans had issues with the season 2 finale, which ended without much in the way of a climax. Others took issue with the increasingly large number of changes the show made from the George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, including Martin himself.
Can season 3 bounce back from those criticisms? We likely won't find out for sure until 2026, which is the earliest the third season of House of the Dragon can realistically air. Condal sounds sanguine, though. "I will say, this is the best season to come," he said. "[I]t is as outlandish as Leavesden Studios has been with our show to date. We've outlandished ourselves this time around. So plenty to see, it will be a good one."
I'm not entirely sure what he means by "outlandish," but I get the idea he's referring to the scale of the production. House of the Dragon season 2 left Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen and King Aegon Targaryen on the brink of all-out war, and there are indeed some huge events just over the horizon.
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