We've been hearing for a while that the third season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon will begin filming this March. That's not 100% confirmed, but all the signs seem to be pointing that way. Now we've heard about an end date: Redanian Intelligence, a site that specializes in getting scoops about all things sci-fi and fantasy, has shared on its social media that season 3 is "currently planned to film from March to October 2025."
This isn't 100% confirmed either, but RI is pretty reliable so I'm willing to go with it. Assuming this is true, it means that the cast and crew of House of the Dragon will be filming the third season of the show for around seven months, which is a long time. Interestingly, that's actually longer than it took the team to film season 2, where filming ran from April of 2023 through September of that same year, a span of five months.
Why the extended scheduled? Well, I dare to hope that HBO might be planning to give us more episodes. The first season of House of the Dragon had a full suite of 10 episodes, matching the number of episodes in most seasons of Game of Thrones. Season 1 of House of the Dragon actually took a staggering 11 months to film, spanning from March 2021 through February 2022, but I imagine a lot of that had to do with the fact that the show was brand new at that point and they were still building everything, not to mention the difficulty of managing the COVID restrictions still in place at the time. Fans were disappointed when the second season had a reduced count of only eight episodes.
Although we don't know the full story, based on the comparatively limp season 2 finale, it seems obvious to me that the producers of House of the Dragon had originally planned for season 2 to have more episodes but had to alter those plans for some reason, whether it was the budget, or scheduling difficulties brought on by the actors and writers strikes of 2023, or whatever. "There was a host of factors that went into that decision," showrunner Ryan Condal said of the reduced episode count. "It's a big, ambitious show, and it can become unwieldy in terms of the number of shoot days [you have], and certainly the the amount of resources that you have to make it...[T]here was a bit of a rebalancing of the narrative that was necessary to happen. This eight-episode cadence helped us to find that."
Condal had since made other comments that made me think that the eight-episode structure was here to stay. "I haven’t had discussions with HBO about it, I would just anticipate the cadence of the show, from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will continue to be the same from Season 2 on," he said around the time season 2 wrapped up. But if they're filming season 3 for this long, maybe they've rethought that direction. I would certainly hope so; when you're dealing with a story as complex as the one in House of the Dragon, which has a huge cast and a lot of moving parts, it helps to have as much space to play as possible. So maybe season 3 will have 10 full episodes?
It's also possible that season 3 will take longer to shoot simply because they have a lot of really complicated sequences to get through. There's a major action sequence called the Battle of the Gullet that should be coming very early in season 3; the rumor is it was originally meant to happen at the end of season 2 but got pushed back. And if you've read the the source material for the show — the book Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin — you know things continue to be crazy from there.
Granted, the show has changed a lot from the book, so it's hard to predict exactly what season 3 could bring. But I'll be optimistic and say that an extended shoot time means more episodes. We won't find out for sure until the third season starts airing on HBO and Max in 2026.
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