Game of Thrones was the biggest show on television, so it's no wonder HBO spent big on trying to deliver a spin-off. Unfortunately, the first attempt at a new show set in the world of Westeros was not a success – and ended up costing the network $30 million as a result.
Jane Goldman, best known for penning the first Kingsman movie and X-Men: First Class, wrote a pilot episode for HBO, with S.J. Clarkson (Succession, Jessica Jones, The Defenders, Dexter) as director. Naomi Watts was cast in a leading role, with the show set to take place thousands of years before the main Game of Thrones saga, showing the origins of the White Walkers and much more.
In a new book by James Andrew Miller, former WarnerMedia entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt revealed that the first episode alone cost a staggering amount of money. "They had spent over $30 million on a Game of Thrones prequel pilot that was in production when I got there," Greenblatt said in the book, titled Tinderbox (via Insider).
"And when I saw a cut of it in a few months after I arrived, I said to [HBO boss Casey Bloys], 'This just doesn't work and I don't think it delivers on the promise of the original series.' And he didn't disagree, which actually was a relief."
"So we unfortunately decided to pull the plug on it," Greenblatt continued. "There was enormous pressure to get it right and I don’t think that would have worked."
The result was the Game of Thrones prequel being scrapped – and another rising from its ashes. House of the Dragon is now en route to HBO Max, with the new series telling a story set only a few hundred years before the main Game of Thrones story, rather than thousands of years. Matt Smith leads the cast and director Miguel Sapochnik acts as showrunner.
Speaking to 12DOVE earlier this year, Sapochnik compared filming House of the Dragon to his latest feature film, Finch, which stars Tom Hanks as a man living in a post-apocalyptic world who builds a robot named Jeff to take care of his dog.
"[They're] very, very, very different. Finch is two actors and a dog. House of the Dragon is lots of dragons and lots of actors. [Laughs] They're very different experiences," Sapochnik said.
"But the practice is the same if you're a director, which is I always ask myself in any project that I'm involved in, whose story is it? Whose point of view is it? What am I trying to say, and is that getting in the way of telling the story? So I approach things from the same perspective. I think that making Finch was a welcome respite from making Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. But it doesn't mean that I wasn't on set now and then, with an RV and a dog and a couple of actors, and I didn't wish that I had a dragon there too."
Read the full interview with Sapochnik here. House of the Dragon will release on HBO Max next year.
