Earlier this year Game of Thrones star Kit Harington revealed that HBO would not be moving forward with a sequel series about his character Jon Snow. "Currently, it's off the table, because we all couldn't find the right story to tell that we were all excited about enough," he said. "So, we decided to lay down tools with it for the time being. There may be a time in the future where we return to it, but at the moment, no. It's firmly on the shelf."
This was a blow to Game of Thrones fans who wanted to see what happened to Jon Snow after the end of the show. Did he live with the wildings? Did he ever see Sansa or Arya again? Did he feel like coming south and trying to claim the Iron Throne? We may well never know.
in fact, if Harington had his way, we would never have known that this sequel show was in development at all. The reality is that, since Game of Thrones ended in 2019, HBO has worked on a number of spinoff ideas, some of which went forward, some of which are dead for good, and some of which are still in limbo. With new reports coming in all the time, it seemed like a good time to check in on the state of all things Game of Thrones spinoffs. How many shows exactly has HBO developed, and what are the chances we'll see any of them on our TV screens?
Already happening: House of the Dragon
This first one is easy. Based on George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, House of the Dragon is set over 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones and tells the story of the Dance of the Dragons, a sectarian war fought between rival factions of the Targaryen family over who gets to sit the Iron Throne.
The first season of House of the Dragon aired in 2022 and the second in 2024. The third is on track for 2026, and a fourth will wrap the whole thing up.
Happening soon: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg short stories, will air on HBO and Max sometime in 2025. Irish actor Peter Claffey plays Dunk, a very tall knight with a heart of gold; and child actor Dexter Sol Ansell plays his precocious squire Egg. This show will have a milder, lighter tone than either Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon.
And these are the only two Game of Thrones spinoffs we know for sure are definitely happening. Everything else is speculative, but there's a lot of everything else:
In development: Aegon's Conquest
Aegon the Conqueror, the first in a long line of kings named Aegon Targaryen, took over Westeros with his sister-wives Rhaenys and Visenya about 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones. His is a pretty good story that I could see making for entertaining TV. Apparently HBO thinks so too, because they've hired writer Mattson Tomlin to develop the idea.
I've got a pretty sick job.
— mattson tomlin (@mattsontomlin) April 7, 2024
Keep in mind: this does not mean that we are definitely getting an Aegon show; in the past, HBO has attached writers to several spinoff projects that never came to fruition. But there has been buzz around this particular idea lately.
I can see a show about Aegon's Conquest going on the air after House of the Dragon has wrapped up, to continue the adventures of the silver-blonde dragon-riding incest enthusiasts who have so captures the hearts and minds of viewers.
"In development"
Now we come to several shows that were announced at one time or another but about which we haven't heard anything in a while. Are they continuing to be developed in the quiet of a back office at HBO headquarters? Have they been shunted aside and no one bothered to say anything? Let's run down the list:
Game of Thrones movie
One of the most recent stories to break is that there's a Game of Thrones movie in early development at HBO. Once again, we should caution that just because HBO is tinkering with an idea behind the scenes doesn't mean it will actualy come to fruition, as executive Casey Bloys cautioned reporters. "They'll develop an idea, we'll see if it's good," he said in November of 2024. "We'll read the scripts along with them. I think it could be fun and interesting. That's the point of development: you see, is there a story that's worthy of being in theaters and a big spectacle? I think it would be fun."
We also don't have any idea what kind of a movie they're developing, although we like the idea of HBO doing something about the Doom of Valyria, the volcanic catastrophe that destroyed the Valyrian empire centuries before the events of Game of Thrones. That sort of topic might be prohibitively expensive to do as a TV show, but could work well as a movie.
Something involving Arya Stark
This one is the barest whisp of a rumor I'm promoting to "in development" because I want to see it. Writing on his Not a Blog in November of 2024, George R.R. Martin shared that he'd met with Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams, who played revenge enthusiast Arya Stark, to discuss some kind of mystery project. " talked about… well, no, better not get into that, do not want to jinx it," he wrote. "But it could be so much fun."
Could this be some kind of TV show involving Arya Stark? Just because the Jon Snow show is on ice doesn't mean HBO has to give up on the idea of a sequel series. Or maybe the Game of Thrones movie we've heard about revolves around Arya, last seen sailing away from Westeros for parts unknown.
It's also possible that Martin, who has irons in many fires, is thinking of working with Maisie Williams on some project completely unrelated to Game of Thrones, but I prefer to think that Arya is coming back.
The Sea Snake and 10,000 Ships
The Sea Snake is another name for Corlys Velaryon, the middle-aged lord played by Steve Toussaint we meet on House of the Dragon. On that show, Corlys is head of the richest house in Westeros. But how did he get that wealth? The Sea Snake show would explore that question, traveling alongside Corlys in his younger years as he embarks on nine voyages to the far corners of the world, making trades that will set him up as the richest man alive.
As for 10,000 Ships, that one would follow Nymeria of the Rhoynar, a leader who lived back in the time when the Valyrian Empire was at its height. Unable to fight the Valyrians and their dragons, Nymeria loaded her people onto ships and landed them in what is now Dorne in Westeros, thereafter marrying into the powerful Martell family. Her story definitely has the shape of an exciting TV show.
I'm grouping these two shows together because, at one point, we heard they had both been set aside by HBO. But George R.R. Martin disabused that notion with a post on his Not a Blog.
"The Nymeria show is still in development. So is the Sea Snake show. And there are others," he wrote in 2023. "How many will get the greenlight like Dunk & Egg? Impossible to say. How long will it take? It depends. No one knows for sure."
It's true: technically, no one knows for sure when or whether these shows will see the light of day. It's been while since we've heard anything official about The Sea Snake or 10,000 Ships, so if they do materialize, it probably won't be for a while. We also know that the Sea Snake show will be animated, if it happens at all.
At least two other animated series set in the Game of Thrones universe
Actually, HBO is working on a couple of animated TV ideas. For one of them, all we know is that it's an animated drama "similar in tone" to Game of Thrones. That could mean pretty much anything; conceiveably, it could even be an animated retelling of Game of Thrones itself.
We've also heard that HBO was working on an animated show set in the Golden Empire of Yi Ti, a distant land modeled after ancient China. We barely hear anything about Yi Ti on either Game of Thrones or in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books, so if this show ends up happening, the writers will have a lot of license to fill in the blanks.
Robert's Rebellion
Other than House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, one of the most obvious stories in the Game of Thrones canon to be adapted for TV is Robert's Rebellion, the war that ended with Daenerys Targaryen's father the Mad King getting booted from the Iron Throne and Robert Baratheon taking his place. This story involves younger versions of a lot of characters we got to know on the original show, including Ned Stark, Jaime Lannister and Stannis Baratheon.
But when HBO was first developing spinoff ideas, Martin said they weren't doing anything with Robert's Rebellion, since he planned to reveal everything worth knowing about the event by the time he was done writing his Song of Ice and Fire series. Of course, that's taking forever, so who's to say HBO won't want to take a crack at it in the meantime? We have heard they're working on something, and that they even considered drafting Rome creator Bruno Heller to develop the idea. But that was back in 2021, and it's hard to know what, if anything, has changed since then.
On the shelf: Snow
This brings us back to Snow, which Harinton said was "on the shelf." A lot of these series are probably experiencing something similar. They haven't been formally axed, but there may not be much practical difference between a formal cancellation and an internal decision to stop devoting resources to the idea.
This doesn't mean the Jon Snow show, called Snow by some fans, can never happen. In fact, HBO executive Casey Bloys recently said that they could return to the idea sometime in the future. “We develop a lot of ideas," he told reporters. "Sometimes they don’t work. We all agreed it didn’t come together, Maybe we’ll try again.”
But it's probably best for now to treat Snow like it's not happening. Otherwise you'll just get your hopes up for a train never gonna come.
Probably dead
Then there are a couple of Game of Thrones spinoff ideas we can assume probably are never coming off the shelf, including:
Flea Bottom
At one point, HBO was developing a show set in Flea Bottom, the poorest district in the city of King's Landing. We don't know what that show would look like. A high-stakes drama about characters trying to escape poverty? A slice-of-life family drama? Reportedly, HBO wasn't sure either, which might have been of the reason they ditched the idea.
Empire of Ash
While Flea Bottom is probably dead, Empire of Ash might never have existed. It was the name given to a prequel show purportedly set in the Valyrian Empire at the height of its power, back when dragons filled the skies and the Targaryens were just a minor family who had the good sense to get out of dodge before the heart of the empire was swallowed in a volcanic catastrophe. The show would have also allegedly had plotlines set on the little-seen continent of Sothoryos. Godzilla writer Max Borenstein was reportedly developing the idea.
This certainly does sound interesting, but the source of this information isn't quite as reliable as some of the other leaks, so I'm treating it with a bit more skepticism. Still, it's not hard to imagine HBO exploring something in this area. Maybe it didn't work out this time, but possibly in the future? Or maybe, as we suggested above, they retooled the idea for a movie, which would help them get around the massive budget problems a show about this topic would present.
One difficulty is that a show like this would have next to no source material to work of. So far, every Game of Thrones spinoff that HBO has greenlit — and even projects that are getting buzz like the Aegon's Conquest show — are based on books written by George R.R. Martin. It's probably a good idea for HBO to stick to ideas that are based on something solid, which might explain why this last series never made it to air:
Definitely dead: Blood Moon
Finally, we have the strange case of Blood Moon, the first Game of Thrones spinoff that HBO really got serious about. They were so serious that they spent millions of dollars making a pilot that starred high-powered actors like Naomi Watts. But after they saw the finished product, they decided not to move forward with the show. The same day announced that Blood Moon was canceled, they announced that House of the Dragon was happening, and death begat life.
Blood Moon was going to be set thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones, when the White Walkers invaded Westeros for the first time. For whatever reason, the show just wasn't what HBO was looking for, and it pulled the plug. It's not coming back.
We did our best in this article to suss out which Game of Thrones spinoffs will go and which are getting left to die on the side of the road, but George R.R. Martin is correct that in TV development, "No one knows for sure." Still, I'd bet money that these picks turn out more or less correct down the line.
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