House of the Dragon Showrunners Address Comparisons to Amazon's The Rings of Power

By Charlie Ridgely

Fans of fantasy franchises are about to be fed over the next couple of months. Two of the biggest fantasy franchises on the planet are launching new TV shows within weeks of one another. House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series, is debuting on HBO and HBO Max at the end of August. Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is hitting Amazon Prime Video a couple weeks later. The timing of the releases has caused plenty of people to start comparing the two projects, even before they've been released.

Perhaps the only thing these projects have in common is the fact that they're both big budget fantasy shows. There's not any sort of competition between them, as some may suggest. House of the Dragon co-showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik are hopeful that both shows can coexist and find major success. According to them, more fans for one likely means more fans for the other.

"My hope is that both series work and find a huge fanbase and that there's a huge overlap in the fanbase," Condal told The Hollywood Reporter during House of the Dragon's premiere event on Wednesday. "I think the more big, expensive – really expensive – fantasies that work on television, the better for us fans because they'll make more of them. I desperately want Rings of Power to work. I'm going to be there watching it the first night it's available, I will watch all of them."

"Lord of the Rings is great IP and great material," Sapochnick added. "I have no idea what they've done – I didn't make it past The Hobbit 1 – but fantastic. The more the merrier really."

During the same interview, Condal opened up about the how the story came together for House of the Dragon, as it was important for them to find something unlike the original Game of Thrones series.

"As soon as George pitched this to me, all the gears clicked into place. Telling the story of the Targaryens at the height of their power made tons of sense coming off the original show because we get to know Daenerys very well, we get to know the myth and legend of her family but we don't know much about the Targaryens as they actually existed," Condal said. "It's an intimate story; it's a bit of a Greek tragedy about the house divided, a house that tears itself apart over a succession. Very Game of Thrones but very different from the original."

House of the Dragon is set to premiere on HBO and HBO Max on August 21st.

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