House of the Dragon stars Matt Smith (Daemon Targaryen) and Fabien Frankel (Criston Cole) swung by MegaCon in Orlando, Florida this past weekend, where they shared some updates with fans. According to ScreenRant, the actors shared that they received the scripts for Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of season 3 in their email inboxes the night prior. One assumes that they'd already received the scripts for Episodes 1, 2 and 3 beforehand. The upcoming third season will likely run for eight episodes, so they almost have the whole thing.
And a good thing, too, because we've heard that filming on House of the Dragon season 3 will run from this March all the way through October, which is a long time to shoot a season of TV. We've seen lots of hints lately that production is ramping up, like the announcement that English actor James Norton will play Ormund Hightower, the nephew of Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). Pretty soon, the cameras will start rolling on this crucial season.
The first season of House of the Dragon was very well-received all around, with Game of Thrones fans ecstatic that they had what appeared to be a worthy successor to their favorite show. The second season was much more divisive, with lots of changes made to the source material by George R.R. Martin (so many, in fact, that the author publicly criticized the show) and the season finale ending on a bit of an anticlimax, with a lot of cliffhangers and lot enough payoff.
So far as that ending goes, there's evidence that the producers wanted to have a bigger second season but had to scramble at the last minute to condense things, whether because of the writers' and actors' strikes of 2023, new management at HBO's parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, budget concerns, or whatever. At minimum, it seems like the producers were able to plan the third season front to back without that kind of interruption, which can only be to the show's benefit.
Expect the third season of House of the Dragon to kick off with a big action sequent that was supposed to end the second season but got bumped. New episodes are expected to drop sometime in 2026. In the meantime, HBO is airing the first season of a new Game of Thrones prequel show, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, later this year:
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