Anticipation is mounting for the final season of Game of Thrones, but HBO is already making plans for following up the Song of Ice and Fire by delving back into the past of Westeros.
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The network was developing five different spinoff series to continue the narrative established in Game of Thrones, before finally moving forward on one pilot project from writer and producer Jane Goldman. And while it might have seemed that there would be multiple Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works at one point, HBO is scaling back and focusing on one of those series.
“The development process was very positive,” said HBO President Casey Bloys. “Other people got busy, things didn’t come together … It’s fair to say we’re excited about this pilot, we’re hoping to shoot it in the first quarter of ’19, I don’t anticipate any movement on any other prequels until we [see what this one is].”
Bloys revealed the other spinoff projects were on hold to Entertainment Weekly at an event for the Television Critics Association, where he also provided updates on other new and continuing HBO series.
One of those scripts was by Max Borenstein, which also generated a lot of positive buzz around the network before they decided to move forward with Goldman’s project. It seems like Borenstein’s script will remain on the back burner for the time being, dependent on the success — or failure — of Goldman’s prequel.
But for his part, Bloys is excited about the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel pilot. The HBO executive revealed some new details about how the series will remain in the world of Westeros while carving out its own unique space in the lore that fans have come to obsess over.
“The story’s time period, another 8,000 years before [the events in GoT], it’s far enough away so it feels like a different story, a different world, because it is — the kingdoms do not exist at this point,” Bloys said. “So it felt distinct. We’re not trying to do Game of Thrones Part II. No one is going to duplicate what [GoT showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] did. By setting it when we did, there’s a lot going on, a lot of dynamics that are related to Game of Thrones, but it’s different enough with its time period and characters its duplicative.”
We’ll find out more about this upcoming prequel series in the coming months as HBO gears up to begin production in early 2019.
