House of the Dragon Showrunner Breaks Down How the Game of Thrones Prequel Will Stand Out

Games of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon will be one of HBO’s biggest TV tentpoles in 2022 – but will the series offer fans anything new? Granted, House of the Dragon is set about two centuries before the events of Game of Thrones, but the first trailer for the prequel made the prequel feel very much in line with its predecessor. It’s also raised eyebrows that House of the Dragon showrunner Miguel Sapochnik is the same man who directed some of GoT’s most famous (and infamous) episodes. Well, Sapochnik is speaking up to let it be known that House of the Dragon will indeed stand out on its own! 

Speaking with THR, Miguel Sapochnik addressed how the creative team of House of the Dragon is walking the line of making something new, while still honoring the larger Game of Thrones franchise: 

“I think we were very respectful of what the original show is,” said Sapochnik. “It wasn’t broken, so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. House of the Dragon has its own tone that will evolve and emerge over the course of the show. But first, it’s very important to pay respects and homage to the original series, which was pretty groundbreaking. We’re standing on the shoulders of that show and we’re only here because of that show. 

So the most important thing for us to do is to respect that show as much as possible and try and complement it rather than reinvent it. And I was involved in making the original show, so I feel like that’s been useful. Like, I’m not arriving going, ‘Let’s change everything! Let’s do a different color palette!’ No, I quite like the color palette.”

While Sapochnik admits that the format of Game of Thrones works, he also recognizes that there needs to be something fresh injected into House of Dragon to make it truly stand out: 

“That said, we can’t say, ‘Well, when we did Thrones, we did it this way …’” Sapochnik said. “If you start every sentence with that, you’ve lost. This is something else, and should be something else. It’s a different crew, different people, different tone. Hopefully, it will be seen as something else. But it will have to earn that — it won’t happen overnight. Hopefully, fans will enjoy it for the thing that it is. We’ll be lucky if we ever come close to what the original show was, so we’re just putting our heads down and getting on with it and hoping what we come up with is worthy of having a Game of Thrones title.”

House of the Dragon will premiere on HBO in 2022.