Aegon the Conqueror writer still working on new Game of Thrones spinoff

Game of Thrones ended back in 2019. The prequel series House of the Dragon wrapped up its second season just the other week. And there's another prequel show, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, coming next year. Things are happening in Westeros.

And HBO is developing more shows in the background. Not long ago, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin said that the network was developing seven different shows, three of them live-action and three of them animated. We don't know which, if any, of these series will eventually make it to the screen — HBO has developed and then abandoned Game of Thrones spinoff ideas before — but cleary, the network (and parent company Warner Bros. Discovery) is interested is exploring more.

One of the shows we know is in development is a live-action prequel series about Aegon the Conqueror, the first Targaryen king of Westeros who conquered and united the Seven Kingdoms (minus Dorne, if we're being particular) with his sister-wives Rhaenys and Visenya over 100 years before the events of House of the Dragon.

Aegon's story is very important to the mythology of Martin's world, so it makes sense that HBO would potentially want to dramatize it. Now that we know House of the Dragon is wrapping up with season 4, I can imagine an Aegon the Conqueror show being queued up to follow it. House of the Dragon has told us a bunch about Aegon that we didn't know, most notably that he was inspired to conquer the Seven Kingdoms because of a prophetic dream about the White Walkers overruning the place if a Targaryen ruler didn't unite the realm. Like House of the Dragon, an Aegon the Conqueror show would be based on Martin's book Fire & Blood.

I very much doubt that every spinoff HBO is working on will make it to air, but I suspect Aegon will make the cut. The prequel series is being managed by Mattson Tomlin, who also wrote the upcoming sequel to The Batman. Asked on Twitter/X whether the show was still happening, Tomlin responded with a GIF of Kermit the Frog working furiously at his typewriter. So yes, the Aegon the Conqueror show is very much still happening:

"That one is very early days where I'm currently writing the script, currently doing a lot of great back and forth with George," Tomlin said back in May. "In speaking to George, it became really clear, 'This is history, treat this like it is what happened.' Unlike the original series, I don't have thousands of pages to go off to adapt. I've got a couple hundred that I'm really focused on, and in those pages of Fire & Blood, there are a lot of clues."

"It kind of turns into doing Napoleon or doing Alexander the Great or doing some great historical figure where we know a lot about the guy. We know where he was, we know who he conquered, we know who lived, and we know who died. That all becomes the plot, and then it becomes my job to go, but what did it mean thematically? How did it feel? What were the emotions when this person died and this person lived? We don't have the context. We don't know what anybody said."

I broadly agree with everything Tomlin is saying here, but if you ask me, House of the Dragon is starting to go too far afield of the source material, finding thematic meaning and emotional resonance in a way that basically changes everything important about Fire & Blood. So if the Aegon show does end up happening, I hope Tomlin and his team don't squelch what makes the book special and interesting while digging into the details of the show.

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