The Dragon Demands

HBO just released the trailer for the Stephen King series "IT: Welcome to Derry" yesterday...the Tuesday AFTER the alleged upfront panel last Wednesday. This gives me more hope that they were just incrementally releasing trailers one at a time and we MIGHT get Dunk & Egg trailer Sunday night with the Season 2 finale of The Last of Us. Not guaranteed....but enough that I'm at least going to be "paying attention" on Sunday night. Couldn't hurt. Plus...I was watching TLOU Season 2 finale anyway

Hey everyone, I just reached the end of a three month long personal drive to update the Faith Militant Uprising article: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Faith_Militant_uprising#Insurgency_.2844-48_AC.29 I hope it can be refined more overtime by others, but at least it's in a better state than when I started. My last piece was to make a crude map of where all the different Faith Militant bands were active. I didn't get to make battle maps for Great Fork of the Blackwater or Battle Beneath the Gods eye, etc. But at this point I'm handing the whole page off for others to do better than I could.

First teaser trailer for Jason Momoa and Temeura Morrison's "Chief of War": it's like Game of Thrones but set during the Hawaii wars of unification in the 1700s.

S&P Downgrades Warner Bros. Discovery To Junk Status On “Weak Credit Metrics” That Would Get Worse If Company Splits https://deadline.com/2025/05/sp-downgrades-warner-bros-dicovery-junk-status-linear-tv-1236406355/ God help us all.

HBO Max International Expansion 2025 & Beyond (Sky Atlantic Dunk and Egg Launch UK & Germany) This report took me weeks to complete. It nearly destroyed me.

IMPORTANT DATES: Turns out the big Netflix upfront event/convention called the "Tudum Event" will be on May 31st, not too long from now. San Diego Comic Con is July 24th - 27th

I thank you kindly, ser... but it seems Seven Havens was pushed to 2027. Oh Harry Potter is 2026....they only just had sets go up, so I thought early 2027 (seems more late 2026?) IMPORTANT: you say Rings of Power might not be late 2026 but early 2027? What basis is there for that? Because I HOPE it comes Spring 2027 as I need time to recover from House of the Dragon Season 3. I'll have a more thorough schedule in a bit - keeps me from losing my mind - but dear god was 2024 stacked: House of the Dragon, ONE MONTH LATER Rings of Power 2.....then Penguin...then Dune: Prophecy...through Creature Commandos....Winter was a bit of a fallow time with only White Lotus....then dear god, Andor and The Last of Us Season 2. But NOW? ...I can get by on new Rick and Morty for the rest of Summer, then Alien:Earth....then Peacemaker 2 (DID NOT have interest in the first season but apparently crosses over with other DC stuff so I'll catch up then). Fall is very odd...maybe no one wants to be opposite Stranger Things' final season? It binges all in one day! Oh what am I thinking? Hazbin Hotel Season 2 will be late 2025, then Fallout 2 (the writing on the Helliverse is amazing, and it's great indie creators managed to get it made)

A lot of people and mainstreamer critics have remarked on how the long wait between seasons hurt House of the Dragon....and how it's actually an industry-wide problem, we get slammed over it just because HotD is such a prominent show...but it led me to read these interesting post-mortem on 2024 articles: https://www.theringer.com/2025/01/17/tv/long-breaks-between-tv-seasons-streaming-severance-squid-game-strikes https://www.vulture.com/article/severance-season-two-euphoria-season-3-why-so-long.html 1 - The scale of production is indeed larger, as each streamer competes to make mega-blockbusters that inherently take longer to film. Even Game of Thrones couldn't keep up with annual releases after Season 6. 2 - As we saw at Disney with Marvel TV shows, many flagship streaming shows were made by movie producers, at movie quality...and at a movie pace. Turnaround time was secondary. Look at specific articles on the Marvel reforms that took place between Secret Invasion and Daredevil - "we had movie people who didn't know how to work at TV pace". The GOOD news is that there are reforms in place for this (not that it affected HotD as much, as it's inherently a spectacle show) 3 - The VFX crunch, which reached a breaking point in early 2023 - remember when Marvel was criticized for films like Ant Man 3 having rushed CGI? The streamers expanded their large scale, VFX heavy shows faster than the VFX industry could keep pace, leading to massive delays and labor union disputes. They're trying to expand their capacity now. 4 - ...Internationalization takes time. You'd think they'd do this during the long VFX post-production, but it takes about 4 months to do all the dubbing and subtitling. Game of Thrones wasn't as concerned with that through as late as seasons 5 and 6 (the attitude was "maybe we have international non-English viewers but we don't really care". We don't live in that world anymore and it took them time to adjust. 5 - Streamers would wait until AFTER the first season aired to renew shows meant to be serialized. Even renewing House of the Dragon for Season 2 the same WEEK that Season 1 premiered....they weren't filming in 2022. They film every other year, because they're waiting for renewal. The GOOD news is that the streamers themselves realized all these problems after 2024, i.e. HBO's Francesca Orsi has acknowledged these issues....the PROBLEM is that it's going to take a year or two to see the results, simply due to production time. Cast in point this apparently drove their recent announcement that Dunk & Egg Seasons 2 and 3 would film back to back (among...other considerations) They ARE starting to realize "we have to renew these things in two season sets if they're going to retain audiences". My fear down the road is that this will lead to projects that are "too big to fail" - i.e. if they renew Harry Potter for 10 years locked in they can't cancel it. But they weren't going to in the first place

Again - for all we know filming would have gone long and pushed to Fall anyway

Elio mentioned this in the other thread: Is it just me, or are streamers - particularly HBO Max - cutting back on their schedules this Summer and Fall, trying to stack their schedules for NEXT season? Because it seems HBO Max wants to stack for their big European launch, which makes sense. But as for the rest...what the heck is up with production schedules nowadays? I thought the ripple effects of the 2023 strikes were over?

We were spoiled by having heavy hitters The Last of Us Season 2 and Star Wars Andor on at the same time in Spring season 2025. Now it's the start of Summer, they're ending, and I feel like the rug got pulled out from under us. Combined with that we don't have Dunk & Egg dominating our schedules in Fall either. What the heck else is there the rest of 2025? Wheel of Time 3 got better but it's done, Rings of Power isn't coming back, and ...should we even mention Witcher Season 4 this summer? And I don't want to even watch the truncated second and final Sandman season on Netflix. ....Rick and Morty is starting up next week and they've been on a roll the past two seasons (after a bit of a slump in Season 5), and Alien: Earth is coming in August. ...otherwise this isn't like last year where it was "the summer of HotD Season 2". Weird how their schedules can alternate like that; Star Wars didn't have any live-action shows last Spring 2024, only then have the Acolyte in summer (which if nothing else...was a high profile show we were all talking about) Apparently....I think when they were planning out their schedules a year in advance, all the streamers thought Squid Game's third and final season would dominate when it starts in late June so they didn't want to premiere opposite it....not realizing A - it dropped off after Season 1, B - due to the binge model it wouldn't dominate ALL of summer. I wasn't ...looking forward, to "Ironheart" - after something like "Daredevil". But given that there's not a damn thing else on in late June I might put it on. EDIT: Oh crud, Jason Momoa's historical epic "Chief of War" is coming on August 1st?!

I honestly don't know if HotD Season 3 will be pushed back later in 2026, or if that's a good or bad thing, as I see merit to both arguments. I DO NOT think WB has lost confidence in it, just that for scheduling reasons they might want to "ration out" their content more. We also don't know if HotD 3 would even be DONE in time for a Summer release, they just said "later than Spring" (reasonable). Cinematic universes like Marvel and Star Wars never put out more than 3 shows a year (barring backlogs due to pandemic) and have just recently established a formal RULE, "no more than 3 shows per year". Usually defining seasons as Spring/Summer/Fall. THEY have to consider TOO MANY shows. But we're dealing with specific issues here due to how HotD Season 2 was harmed by the writer's strike and they might want to "win back" the audience. There are two options: Release HotD Season 3 in Summer, following only a matter of weeks after Dunk & Egg Season 1, so that HotD Season 3 gets a boost of "momentum" - that is, audience retention. Put it out in Fall to ration out content over the course of a year and reduce crippling content gaps for the franchise. UNLESS of course, they film Dunk & Egg Seasons 2 and 3 later this year or early 2026? For a Spring 2027 release? (shrug) At this point I think they should do what's best for HotD 3 after all the hits it took: air it right after Dunk & Egg, to..."ride in its wake" as it were, ride the wave of viewership before it subsides. Then again....dear god I'm so backlogged on House of the Dragon analysis. I never went through EVERY interview ever across two full seasons, and on top of that we'll be busy with Dunk & Egg. Crap. How is it that we have both nothing to do and we're too busy to handle it all?

I'm not concerned about the quality of the shows - either Dunk & Egg or even HotD 3 now that we have a season unaffected by strikes or pandemics.... ...I'm still not concerned about that. What I AM concerned about is viewership reaction. People losing interest in the franchise. I'm trying to talk myself through why we shouldn't.... MOST people tune out after the season finales so they simply wouldn't have been online even if HotD Season 2 was perfectly received. We had similar turnover problems even after Season 1. Filming news for HotD Season 3 hasn't truly begun yet. We got "announcements" but no significant spy photos due to exterior filming starting in June. Once that comes it will be just like the hype around the Rook's Rest spy photos. Given that Dunk & Egg hasn't even begun yet, it's hard for people to "lose interest" in it - oh the fan reporters and avid fans WE encounter are fatigued...but MOST people, mainstream news channels, are outright UNAWARE that they even FILMED a Dunk & Egg TV series, much less that it's been delayed. Delaying a start doesn't have too much impact. Every piece of news we've had about House of the Dragon Season 3 has been good so far - i.e. not skimping on the Daeron subplot because they're casting several secondary characters in it. Not saying this means it will be great, just we have nothing "specific" to be worried about so far. So many people are freaking out now that the shows are in peril - I'm not....but I've ended up panicking anyway, at the fact that everyone ELSE is panicking. Does that make sense?

What other parts of their second-half-of-2025 schedule look like they're holding back on content? Was something else delayed?

Why blow their content NOW, when they'd have to release it on Sky Atlantic? Seriously after Sky Atlantic the only remaining big territory is India - that's the key to everything. If they get India they're on the verge of getting the Middle East, giving them a territory corridor stretching from eastern Australia to Great Britain. They've already bought one third ownership of the Middle-east distributor, OSN. Oh, the situation in Ukraine plus the holdouts in Ontario will prevent them from getting all of Europe and North America, but they've already secured the continent bonuses for South America and Australia. Before too long they'll have Disney in a classic double-envelopment in Irkutsk.

My little summary of why delaying Dunk & Egg to Winter of early 2026 makes sense because that means it gets to be the centerpiece of their huge launch then of HBO Max streamer across the UK and Germany:

The UK's current national debt is over 100% of their annual GDP (that means that even if they shut down ALL services from military to infrastructure, which they can't, they couldn't pay it off in a single year) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_national_debt This is basically how Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists approached the USA's national debt when they started out - national debt isn't inherently a "bad" thing, because you're always "in debt" before your investment pays out. You see in the long run, we're all dead. What IS bad is if you get your credit rating lowered - that is, if you fail to pay back your interest payments, banks will be less willing to lend you money in the future. So long as you take out loans to pay the other loans BUT keep paying off the interest rate payments on time, you can keep kicking the can forward. Bronn: I've never borrowed money before. I'm not clear on the rules. Tyrion: Well, the basic principle is: I lend you money, and after an agreed-upon period of time, you return it - with interest. Bronn: And what if I don't? Tyrion: Well, you have to. Bronn: But what if I don't? Tyrion: This is why I don't lend you money (i.e. "I won't lend you money again") So long as you keep up with the regular payments you can technically be "in debt" for the whole thing for a long time...that's the entire concept of a loan. Borrowing a total of money that I don't actually have immediately.

Most of that debt is in long term loans on the scale of 15 years. I talk about this farther back - they actually DO NOT need to frantically spend all their debt right now. Basically we need a more "Scandinavian" model of tax'n'spend: they take out big loans, to fund a lot of content. If they only focus on paying off the debt they won't produce. You have to spend money to make money. Margin spending, etc. etc.

Mostly for the HBO Max Sky Atlantic launch (UK/Germany/Italy). Why drop a major release on Sky Atlantic...only four months before their in-house streamer's biggest launch in four years? Pushing HotD Season 3 is more of a bonus - for all we know it's not coming until Fall 2026. At any rate, I'm unconcerned.

Waiting for Elio to make the news post thread

Pygram was well known for acting the hell out of roles in a silicon mask

Dunk and Egg pushed to around January 2026. Kind of makes sense to tie it in with the launch date for HBOMax across the Sky Atlantic zone.

Max is changing its name …back to “HBO MAX”. This is not a joke: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/max-changes-name-hbo-max-1236397399/ Well…at least they got rid of that ugly purple color scheme.

https://x.com/rhaenicentfiles/status/1922038482991460736 According to art director Roger Hom, the finale shot was meant as a “nightmarish premonition.” The foreground evokes the swords of the Iron Throne, the candles in the Sept they prayed together, Aegon’s dream, the painted table at Dragonstone and “a funeral pyre for both of them.”

We are hoping for a Dunk and Egg teaser trailer and maybe casting announcements at the big WBD upfront panel on Wednesday