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 GamesRadar+ 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.
