Kit Harington may not have come up with that Jon Snow sequel idea after all

Since before Game of Thrones ended in 2019, HBO was working on developing ideas for spinoffs. One of those eventually became the prequel series House of the Dragon, which returns for its second season in June. Another is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, which will probably be along in 2025.

And then there was talk of a sequel series that would have followed fan favorite character Jon Snow (Kit Harington) after the end of Game of Thrones, when he was once again exiled to the Night's Watch to live out the remainder of his days in the snowy North. Unfortunately, HBO has set that show aside. “Right now, it’s not [moving forward], no,” Harington said on a new episode of the podcast The Discourse. “And it’s one of the reasons I didn’t or haven’t really spoken about it—is that it was in development. And we kind of wanted the space to develop it and see if it was worth doing.'

"HBO came to me a number of years back about whether I wanted to do it. And I sort of said, ‘Yeah, let’s let’s give it a go.’ And then we all tried and we couldn’t find something that we thought was worth doing. And the last thing we want to do is make something bad. We don’t want to do it unless it’s worth it. But that’s not to say it won’t happen at some point. There’s always the option to if it feels like we can land on the right idea, but at the moment, nothing’s being developed."

One interesting wrinkle here is that Harington says that "HBO came to me" about the project. That's at odds with what we heard about the project early on, where folks were saying that Harington came to HBO.

One of the highest profile people to say this was author and Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin. "Yes, it was Kit Harrington who brought the idea to us," Martin wrote back in 2022. "I cannot tell you the names of the writers/ showrunners, since that has not been cleared for release yet… but Kit brought them in too, his own team, and they are terrific."

That's a little hard to square with Harington saying that HBO "came to me." But we don't have perfect information. Maybe he or Martin or both of them are misspeaking slightly, or maybe Harington did come up with the idea but is now trying to downplay his initiative now that the show isn't going forward. Or maybe information is inherently fluid and no one can ever really know what's going on in a cold and chaotic universe. All of these seem like plausible explanations.

In any case, the Jon Snow show isn't going forward, at least not for now, but the second season of House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and Max on Sunday, June 16! As for Kit Harington, he has a new movie out:

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