Madame Web director recalls making "great" pilot for canceled Game of Thrones prequel

This weekend, British director S.J. Clarkson will debut her first film: Madame Web, where Dakota Johnson plays a clairvoyant superhero with ties to the Spider-Man unvierse. Before that, Clarkson worked in TV, directing episodes of shows like Jessica Jones, Succession, Dexter and more. She was also the director on Bloodmoon, a Game of Thrones prequel series for which HBO made a full pilot, but then decided not to go ahead with.

Eventually, HBO got its Game of Thrones prequel in House of the Dragon. Bloodmoon would have been a very different beast, a show set thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones that featured Naomi Watts in a starring role. To this day, we're not entirely clear on what the show would have entailed, but Clarkson sounds proud of the work she did on the show. "I made a great pilot, I think," she said on Deadline's Crew Call podcast. "Wonderful script by Jane Goldman, and I think we did a pretty good job. And Naomi Watts is sublime. I think she's such a wonderful actress...I know I did my job and delivered it."

One assumes that the rough cut of the Bloodmoon pilot is still out there somewhere in a vault deep in the bowls of HBO. According to Clarkson, they were in post-production when HBO pulled the plug, so things were unfinished. "I'm not sure I want people to see it," she said. Still, HBO, if you ever want to release the pilot on home video or something, I'll pony up. Just saying.

As for whether Clarkson would ever return to Westeros, she's open. "Well, I've not had the phone call yet, but I'd happily pick up the phone to them." We'll see how Madame Web does. So far, the reviews are god-awful.

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