HBO is reportedly cementing plans for the future of their hit Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon. The series was quickly renewed for a second season and while plans for that are coming together the premium cable network are considering what comes next. According to Deadline, HBO is already “mulling a green light” for a third season of the show. Not only that but the trade reports that series executive producer and showrunner Ryan Condal and series creator George R.R. Martin aren’t fully committed to how long the show should be in the end. They note that the pair “continue to go back-and-forth on the number of seasons,” considering three or four seasons in total.
Martin was previously on the record for saying that the show would need at least four seasons, with ten episodes each, to do the story of “Fire & Blood” justice. A major piece of the House of the Dragon puzzle that was also revealed in the report concerns season 2 of the series. According to the trade season 2 has been trimmed from 10 episodes to 8 episodes. It would be easy to assume that Warner Bros. Discovery’s continued penny-pinching would be to blame, but WBD sources tell Deadline “the episode count trim was story-driven.”
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As a result of this change to House of the Dragon season 2 at least one “major battle” has been shifted to season 3. The trade concludes that despite some indecisiveness by the creatives that it’s “more likely that the series would run for four seasons.” In the end, some early planning for the show’s conclusion is almost certainly welcome news to fans of the franchise, some who perhaps still feel burnt by the final season of Game of Thrones.
“There are only so many minutes in an episode (more on HBO than on the network shows I once wrote for), and only so many episodes in a season. Fewer and fewer as time goes by, it seems,” Martin wrote in a blog post back in October. “If House of the Dragon had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to “time jump” over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened.’ As it is, I am thrilled that we still have 10 hours every season to tell our tale…I hope that will continue to be true.” Seems like it isn’t sadly!
No official word on when House of the Dragon season 2 will be released has been confirmed but a summer 2024 premiere is teased in Deadline’s report.
