Ever since the end of Game of Thrones in 2019, HBO has been trying to think up ways to keep the momentum going. Some have succeeded. The prequel series House of the Dragon, set over 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones, premiered in 2022 to excellent ratings and reviews; it has a second season coming out this June. And just recently, we've been getting lots of information about another prequel show called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight.
But not everything HBO has tried has worked out. They made a pilot for a prequel show called Bloodmoon but ended up scrapping the project before the show made it to air. And now they've shelved another project: a sequel show that would have followed Kit Harington's character Jon Snow after the end of the original series, which found Jon banished to the Wall after he killed Daenerys Targaryen. What did he do next? We may never know.
This comes from Harington himself, who talked to Screen Rant about the Jon Snow show while promoting his new movie Blood for Dust, which is out in theaters and on digital on April 19. "I hadn't really ever spoken about it, because it was in development," he said. "I didn't want it leaked out that it was being developed, and I didn't want the thing to happen where people kind of start theorizing, getting either excited about it or hating the idea of it, when it may never happen. Because in development, you look at every angle, and you see whether it's worth it."
Well, that tactic didn't work, because fans were speculating left and right about the Jon Snow show. "And currently, it's not ," Harington continued. "Currently, it's off the table, because we all couldn't find the right story to tell that we were all excited about enough. 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."
The Jon Snow sequel show is "firmly on the shelf"
Now, this doesn't mean we'll never see what happened to Jon Snow beyond the end of Game of Thrones, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Personally, I'm happy that HBO doesn't seem willing to greenlight every spinoff idea they have. They're doing a delicate dance now, trying to satisfy the demand for more Game of Thrones shows without overloading fans to the point where they stop being interested. I think having House of the Dragon air one year and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms air the next year, and having them switch back and forth, is a good place to be. And maybe once those shows are approaching their ends, we can talk about something new.
Speaking of House of the Dragon, the second season will premiere on Sunday, June 16. And HBO may already have a follow-up show in mind:
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