After HBO commissioned five potential spinoffs for 'Game Of Thrones', just one now remains standing and HBO have confirmed that no others will be commissioned for the time being.
Jane Goldman's pilot script, which is set 8,000 years before the events of the main series and is set during the Golden Age Of Heroes and the descent into The Long Night when, well, we'll find out exactly what happened. It's referenced quite a lot in the books and the series, but the remaining spinoff will give more clarity to what it entailed.
Speaking at the HBO TCA press tour, HBO chief Casey Bloys explained the reason for asking for five spinoffs was that "we’d be lucky to get one that we’re very, very excited about, and we did get that. We’re just starting the search for a director... we have to cast it. We hope to be shooting sometime in the new year."
As reported earlier this month, a pilot is now underway with Bloys all but confirming to EW that Belfast will be the venue for filming for the new spinoff. "It’s very likely we’ll end up there, Belfast is very high on the list and makes a lot of sense," said Bloys. On the topic of the spinoff itself and its plot and setting, Bloys was a little more vague.
"The story’s time period, another 8,000 years before, it’s far enough away so it feels like a different story, a different world, because it is — the kingdoms do not exist at this point. So it felt distinct. We’re not trying to do Game of Thrones Part II. No one is going to duplicate what David Benioff and Dan Weiss did. By setting it when we did, there’s a lot going on, a lot of dynamics that are related to Game of Thrones, but it’s different enough with its time period and characters its duplicative."
Meanwhile, no release date has been confirmed as of yet for the final season of 'Game Of Thrones', however Bloys did state that the season will debut in the first half of 2019 - so, really, that could be any time between January and July.
Our guess? Probably sooner rather than later.
