Game of Thrones grew in the telling. The first season of HBO's fantasy megahit had a budget of around $50-$60 million, meaning that each episode cost around $5 or $6 million. In the second season, showrunner David Benioff and Dan Weiss saved a bit of money on each episode so they could mount "Blackwater," which featured the show's first big-scale battle. That episode cost them $8 million, which was seen as a very high spend back in the day.
By the time the show was a cultural phenomenon, HBO was spending $11 million on episodes like "Battle of the Bastards," which to this day has one of the most spectacular medieval battles ever shot for TV. By the eighth and final season, at the height of the show's popularity, after actor salaries had ballooned and episodes routinely featured lots of dragons and fighting, the budget had gone up to around $15 million per episode.
By that point, Game of Thrones was the biggest thing on TV and worth spending that much money on. But its successors started at that point. The second season of prequel series House of the Dragon cost around $20 million an episode, and we don't even want to think about what Amazon spends on its Lord of the Rings show The Rings of Power. It's not just big-ticket fantasy shows either; Severance, an Apple TV+ show about people in an office, cost $20 million per episode to produce. Secret Invasion, a six-episode Marvel show that was widely panned by fans and critics alike, worked out to around $35 million per episode.
Is it any wonder that Hollywood is reportedly trying to reckon with exploding costs? And don't forget that many of these shows only air new seasons two years or more apart. So studios are pouring tons of money into untested series with new episodes spaced so far apart that fans may well forget they existed when they come back round. How long can that really last?
That brings us to a new Game of Thrones prequel series coming out next year: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on the Dunk & Egg novellas by A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin. Martin recently visited the set and had nothing but wonderful things to say, which bodes well for the series. I was intrigued by what he had to say about the scale of the show:
"KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is a smaller show than either GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, with a MUCH smaller budget, but I really want it to be great. Ninety per cent of the story is set in a field, surrounded by tents, we would not need the huge sets the other shows had featured, but it couldn’t look fake or cheap either, and the costumes and the heraldry and the fights all had to be splendid, and…I was so so happy when I got there, and saw what Ira and his team had built."
Unlike Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, which feature ensemble casts of noble characters waging war across continents, often on dragonback, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is about a knight named Dunk and his squire Egg. Dragons are extinct during this period of Westerosi history, so there's no chance of any of them showing up. The first season is based on Martin's novella The Hedge Knight, which is set almost entirely at one location: a tournament in Ashford, in the Reach. Although there are noble-born characters, we'll be getting more of a worm's eye view of the Seven Kingdoms, spending a lot more time with the smallfolk.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is more intimate, funnier, and less grandiose than other big-name fantasy and sci-fi series of the day, which could be extremely refreshing after so much many of these shows seem to have grown to the point of ungainliness. For instance, did you watch the House of the Dragon season 2 finale and find it really anticlimactic? Reportedly the showrunners had more planned but the season was cut short over budget concerns. If these studios aren't willing to pony up the money to give us spectacular, expensive action right out of the gate, they need to think creatively, they need to build to an expensive climax rather than start with one. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms could be a step in that direction.
We don't have an exact release date for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms just yet, although we know it's coming out next year, hopefully earlier rather than later.
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