New Game of Thrones Prequel Writer Compares Project to Napoleon and Alexander the Great

Writer Mattson Tomlin has a lot more leeway to expand on the source material.

By Patrick Cavanaugh

The Game of Thrones franchise is set to expand imminently as Season 2 of the prequel House of the Dragon will be debuting next month, while earlier this year it was announced that The Batman writer Mattson Tomlin would be developing another prequel project that focuses on Aegon Targaryen. The timeline of the series would essentially make it a direct prequel to HBO's Game of Thrones, with the writer recently confirming that the project was still in its "early days." While Tomlin is using the events of Fire & Blood as a reference, he's also expanding the events of the conquest in a major way, likening the experience to telling the stories of great conquerors like Napoleon and Alexander the Great.

"That one is very early days where I'm currently writing the script, currently doing a lot of great back and forth with [creator] George [R.R. Martin]," Tomlin shared with Entertainment Weekly. "In speaking to George, it became really clear, 'This is history, treat this like it is what happened.'"

He continued, "Unlike the original series, I don't have thousands of pages to go off to adapt. I've got a couple hundred that I'm really focused on, and in those pages of Fire & Blood, there are a lot of clues. It kind of turns into doing Napoleon or doing Alexander the Great or doing some great historical figure where we know a lot about the guy. We know where he was, we know who he conquered, we know who lived, and we know who died. That all becomes the plot, and then it becomes my job to go, but what did it mean thematically? How did it feel? What were the emotions when this person died and this person lived? We don't have the context. We don't know what anybody said."

The series focusing on Aegon is only one of many different spin-off projects in the works for the iconic franchise, and while the success of the proper series would lead one to think the franchise could expand exponentially, HBO seems to want to ensure the consistent quality of each spinoff and is selective about which projects to pursue. One spinoff even earned a pilot episode, only for HBO to opt not to move forward on it. Luckily, House of the Dragon has proven to be a hit with viewers and critics alike, which tentatively confirms the network's insight into which projects to pursue.

With it being early days on this Aegon Targaryen project, it will likely be years before it could ever land on the network, with there still being a chance it could be abandoned entirely.

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Stay tuned for updates on the Game of Thrones franchise.

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