A planned Game Of Thrones House Of The Dragon prequel – Aegon’s Conquest – is in the works at HBO. A bit more on it here.
The world of Game Of Thrones is finding itself once again in a sticky spot following the release of the second season of the spin-off prequel series, House Of The Dragon. Given that it’s now been confirmed that the show will end with season four, many fans were lift with a rather anti-climactic feeling following the season two finale. It didn’t really pay off with a spectacular conflict.as the events of the series had led viewers to believe it would.
It’s a conclusion our own James Harvey also reached in our review, with the decision said to be down to budget cuts at HBO’s parent company: the film-deleting, cost-cutting Warner Bros. Given that there seems to be no clear end in sight for Warner Bros tightening of the purse strings, it has fans more than a little worried about whether the House Of The Dragon creators will be able to finish the show in the way that they originally intended.
Of course, Game Of Thrones went through its own fierce criticism, with audiences reacting very negatively to the final season of the wildly successful adaptation of George RR Martin’s fantasy novels. The general consensus there was that the show’s writer’s – without Martin’s books to guide them (he hasn’t finished the series as yet) – struggled to find a satisfying ending of their own.
Whether any of this is on the mind of Mattson Tomlin – the showrunner of the latest Game Of Thrones spin-off – we don’t know. He does however, seem keen to point out that he’s been working very, very closely with Martin to mine the author’s inexhaustible mind about the story that he is adapting for the screen.
Aegon’s Conquest will serve as a prequel to House Of The Dragon, following ‘follows Aegon Targaryen’s bloody, brutal conquest of Westeros with his sister wives, Rhaenys and Visenya. In just two years he successfully unified six of the Seven Kingdoms, with only Dorne able to successfully resist.’ It was announced back in February.
Speaking to Nexus Point News, Tomlin had this to say about adapting Martin’s Fire And Blood for the screen.
“It’s really taking that text and treating it like it’s real history. That’s one of the things that my approach to it was to [that] fire and blood is written like a real history and these things happened. We know the history of Alexander the Great; we know the history of Napoleon. We know what the battles were. We know a lot of the people who died. We know in some cases what was said or what might have been said, but we don’t know everything.
For me, it’s about making sure that I respect George and I respect the text. And then also, it still has to be a dramatic story. Those characters have to go on a journey; they have to change; they have to go from a beginning to a middle to an end. Figuring out how to do all of that with the clues that that textbook has left for me and go, okay, I’m going to interpret this very real history and try to make it a really vivid show that hopefully people love and don’t hate, doing the best I can.”
It certainly sounds like the right path to go down. Time will tell if it brings us a show worth celebrating.
Martin’s Fire And Blood is more like a recorded history, which means writers have a lot of details themselves. Still. Tomlin has written the upcoming The Batman Part II and produced the excellent anime Terminator Zero for Netflix so he certainly has the credentials.
Speaking of George RR Martin, author of the books (and producer of House Of The Dragon), he’s popped up this weekend to promise that a blog post is coming that will lay bare all of his issues and problems with the show. We’ll keep an eye out for that one then and let you know when it arrives.
