Game of Thrones Creator Once Said Dunk & Egg Show Wouldn’t Happen Until He was Finished

Earlier today came the news that HBO is developing a second Game of Thrones prequel series. In addition to the already announced House of the Dragon series, which is scheduled to premiere in 2022, the premium cable network has put George R.R. Martin‘s The Tales of Dunk and Egg into development as its own show. News of this series has resurfaced previous comments by Martin where he said he wouldn’t want these books to be adapted until he was done writing the novellas, since he wouldn’t want that adaptation to have the same fate the flagship series which famously went past the published material.

Back in 2017 when at least five spin-off projects related to Game of Thrones were in development at HBO, Martin took to his blog to offer some clarifications on the news and to say that at the time Dunk & Egg was not one of these projects. At the time Martin said that he would love to do it as a series but he had plans already for even more books in the series and that until he was done writing them there wouldn’t be a show. He wrote:

“We’re not doing Dunk & Egg. Eventually, sure, I’d love that, and so would many of you. But I’ve only written and published three novellas to date, and there are at least seven or eight or ten more I want to write. We all know how slow I am, and how fast a television show can move. I don’t want to repeat what happened with GAME OF THRONES itself, where the show gets ahead of the books. When the day comes that I’ve finished telling all my tales of Dunk & Egg, then we’ll do a tv show about them… but that day is still a long ways off.”

It seems that day has finally arrived though, and it begs the question, has Martin given up on writing the Dunk & Egg novels? Or has he simply changed his mind about adaptation?

The Tales of Dunk and Egg stories follow Ser Duncan the Tall and a young Aegon V Targaryen, who are referred to as Dunk and Egg, and take place some 90 years before the main “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. One thing is clear though, HBO considers Game of Thrones their golden goose and even if the final season of the series was met with mixed reactions (to put it mildly), the ratings and popularity of it on the whole will see them going back to the well.

(Cover Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO)