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HBO Planning Dunk and Egg, Other Thrones-properties


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I'd expect that insofar as Targaryen history is concerned George would like to limit it to material from FaB. Everything after the Dance is basically not *really* written out in great detail aside from the Dunk & Egg stories.

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Yeah, We Got This Covered is a hack site that makes up bullshit for clicks, and the few times they are right it's because they lifted the scoop from other people (often without giving credit).

We know that HBO have talked about a Game of Thrones movie and I'm sure it's something they've got in their back pocket, but there's no way they will risk money on it until House of the Dragon, at least, has proven the franchise's viability beyond the original incarnation.

Flea Bottom is an interesting one. Given that Nine Voyages is effectively a spin-off from House of the Dragon, it makes me wonder if Flea Bottom is as well and will focus on Daemon Blackfyre's tenure as captain of the goldcloaks and his nickname, "Lord Flea Bottom". Though for a real ground-level POV, focusing on say Davos growing up in Flea Bottom in a later time period might be better.

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Interested in Nymeria because I like her refugee story and I hope we get to see water magic vs. fire magic. Action scenes of Nymeria herself or her water witches drowning a few Valyrians to protect Ny Sar would be cool. Too bad they left that book scene out with Tyrion in the show, it could have connected. We'll also see Valyrians being absolute shit heads.

Flea Bottom also sounds interesting. They could humanize the people of city Dany destroyed.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Regarding HBO Max expansion, a good article in NYMag explaining their recent problems with lots of buggy glitches and buffering:

https://www.vulture.com/article/hbo-max-app-crash-problem-fix.html#_ga=2.214449367.1556919069.1628822301-1762818768.1626829408

It turns out that they didn't make a new streaming platform from the ground up like Netflix or Amazon Prime - they basically bootstrapped the old programming for HBO Go and HBO Now to make it quickly.

I don't even think this was a bad thing: Richard Plepler didn't even believe in streaming, "You should buy the cable service". They saw it as a supplement to the cable channel. So when the new administration came in under AT&T, they had to build up a new streaming service REALLY fast and under difficult circumstances. No one wants to be the last streamer out of the gate (the dubious honor goes to Peacock). So yes they rushed it out....but they sort of had to, because the old administration dug them into quite a deep hole.

I actually think that given the massive task ahead of them, just how little the Plepler administration cared about streaming services, that HBO Max achieved a surprisingly large amount of success in relatively little time...it's just that they were that far behind when they started and there's a long way to go.

The good news is HBO is fully aware of all of these problems and is actively working on fixing it. So...I chalk this up as "growing pains".  Amazing how much streaming exploded in the past 5 years. Disney+ was a planned rollout for years, HBO Max was...AT&T came in as the new owners and asked "What's your plan for a full scale streaming service?" and the answer was "we don't have one".  Ugh.

As for the international rollout of HBO Max, to reiterate:

  • They just had a big expansion to all of Latin America back in June
  • "By the end of 2021" they intend to expand into Europe - specifically, markets within Europe where HBO already has a direct market, so they don't have to haggle with third party companies; basically HBO Nordic, HBO Spain & Portugal, and "HBO Europe" (Eastern Europe - Poland and the Baltics plus the Balkans, but not Russia)
  • Parts of Europe where they don't have direct markets will have to wait longer: the elephant in the room are the countries where streaming is done through Sky One: United Kingdom + Ireland, Germany, Italy, Austria.   Besides Sky One it's basically just France (OCS) and the Netherlands (Ziggo). Belgium just uses whatever its neighbors use I think, and Greece is a nonentity. Good news is that OCS's contract runs out in summer 2022, so we think France will get HBO Max by the time House of the Dragon Season 2 rolls out.
  • The merger with Discovery+ may accelerate expansion to the MIddle East and India, on account of the fact that Discovery+ already has streaming services there.
  • No word on expansion into East Asia
  • No word on expansion into Canada or Australia
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  • 3 months later...

There's going to be a new thread for this as soon as it gets a front page writeup, but Variety reports that a SCREENWRITER has finally been hired for the Dunk & Egg prequel pitch:

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/game-of-thrones-tales-of-dunk-and-egg-hbo-series-steve-conrad-1235119192/

Three new live-action prequel pitches were proposed in early 2021 under the new Warner-Discovery administration, which are still active. Dunk & Egg didn't have a writer attached so we didn't know how far along it was in development, but "Young Corlys's Voyages" got Bruno Heller attached (HBO's Rome) and Nymeria got Amanda Segel - and Segel's pitch was well-received enough that it advanced to the next stage, that she was ordered to write a full pilot script.

Variety now reports that a writer has been attached to the Dunk & Egg project: Steve Conrad.

Quote

Conrad previously created the Amazon series “Patriot” as well as the current AMC stop-motion animation series “Ultra City Smiths.” He also co-created the Epix neo-noir series “Perpetual Grace LTD” starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Jimmi SImpson. Conrad directed multiple episodes of all three shows. On the film side, he is known for writing features such as “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and “Wonder.”

This edges Dunk & Egg one step closer to reality, from being a theoretical pitch around the office, to actually having a screenwriter attached.

@Ran

Edited by The Dragon Demands
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Quote

As HBO is preparing to launch of a Game of Thrones prequel series, the network also is exploring a potential sequel centered around one of the original series’ most recognizable characters, Kit Harington’s Jon Snow, Deadline has confirmed. The project is still in exploratory stages, sources said.

DID THEY confirm that?

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2 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

James Hibberd, formerly Benioff's personal mouthpiece at Entertainment Weekly, has lost his mind:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/game-of-thrones-jon-snow-spinoff-1235167415/

He claims that HBO is working on a Jon Snow sequel series - sequel with an "S". And in the article teases that this opens up possibility for an Arya sequel as well.

No one has confirmed this, I think Hibberd is just desperately trying to stay relevant and has no sense of shame.

He was Benioff's personal mouthpiece on the show since the beginning - not even loyal to "HBO", but to Benioff himself - as when he admitted Benioff told him in Season 3 that he intended to wait until season 6 or so to tell HBO he wanted the finale to be a pair of theatrically released movies, so he could strong-arm them into doing it (but it was so ludicrous they couldn't do that). 

Now that Benioff isn't really involved with any of these projects, EW's parent company doesn't own HBO, and Hibberd bounced off to The Hollywood Reporter....I think he's just desperately trying to stay relevant. By making up any wacky clickbait.

Remember that Hibberd inaccurately claimed back in February that a Robert's Rebellion prequel series was being worked on, developed by Bruno Heller. This turned out to be false, or spinning scraps of rumors he'd heard into what he WANTED them to be.

The man is a carnival barker. This is too far.

@Ran  Try asking GRRM about this, if it doesn't get denied immediately the rumor will spiral out of control.

 

Hopefully, Jon would finally work out that Sam, Bran, Tyrion, and Sansa had been playing him, and would hand out some retribution.

Season 8 Jon was a limp lettuce.  On reflection, I think of all the main characters, his was the most ruined.

Edited by SeanF
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I don't know why all the invective about this. It's 100% accurate reporting when confirmed by multiple sites. 

And it's not a surprise at all. The sale of HBO to Discovery+ has led to a wave of very hard-eyed, financially-driven decisions -- shows abruptly getting cancelled, reports of the new bosses wanting both to trim the fat and develop things that have high potential to be popular. A spin-off post-GoT sequel wasn't in the works last year, and the only real change is the ownership. 

So, yeah. Still, early development, who knows where it goes. But Discovery+ is going to try and discover as many ways to produce money-making content as possible, and I'd also guess George's influence on the proceedings are increasingly limited to what is contractually obligated when compared to the first season of GoT.

Hibberd was right to point to Disney's success (with viewership, if not necessarily critically) with its character-focused spin-offs to the MCU and Star Wars. This is pretty obviously someone deciding that there's no reason that the cast and characters  of the most popular show HBO ever made need to sit on the sidelines when the franchise is expanding.

Finally, who knows, it might be good just as a show? Depends on the showrunners and writers and all. It'll be the purest possible licensed fiction and I'm not personally interested in it, but there's clearly an audience out there for it if you look around at the response online. Kit and Jon Show have their fans.

Edited by Ran
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Soo, is this like a tacit admission that the book series will never be finished (assuming George signed off on it)? Otherwise, why work on a sequel based on a character who is still dead in the actual canon? I'm incredibly disappointed by this, to be honest. This franchise has turned into nothing more than a cash grab. 

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7 minutes ago, aromaticanalysis said:

Soo, is this like a tacit admission that the book series will never be finished (assuming George signed off on it)?

No. Because it's licensed fiction and I don't expect George will be involved at all in it. It'll be the GoT-universe.

 

35 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Hibberd was totally wrong about Robert's Rebellion as a show.

DID the other news sites "confirm" this? How? What does "confirmed" even mean in this context?

He was not "totally wrong". There was a prequel that touched on Robert's Rebellion -- what he didn't know was that it was the Tourney at Harrenhal Broadway show, not something for HBO.

Edited by Ran
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5 minutes ago, aromaticanalysis said:

Hah, I'd wait to see that his next blog post isn't praising the writers of this and imploring us to watch to be sure about that. 

That's not creative involvement.

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LOL, well, that's the point were I'm really starting to regret it that George sold those rights ... even if he isn't.

And chances are pretty bad that I'm watching this - Kit Harrington is hardly a great actor and his portrayal of Jon Snow was, well, underwhelming, and not just because the way the character was written.

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