Warner Bros. Developing a Game of Thrones Movie
Westeros is coming to the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter has heard from “multiple sources” that HBO is planning a Game of Thrones movie. The film is said to be in “very early stage development” and doesn’t have a creative team yet; it’s not even clear if this would be a continuation of the show or a prequel like House of the Dragon or the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, or some other kind of offshoot. Game of Thrones was based on George R.R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels, collectively called A Song of Ice and Fire, and took it’s name from the first book. A Song of Ice and Fire has not yet been finished, with two books to go, one of which Martin has been writing (or not writing, as the case may be) for fourteen years; many fans – including Gary of Nerdrotic – are convinced the series will never conclude, at least with Martin as the writer. Game of Thrones eventually had to move beyond the novels after adapting the last written one, and its final season was a big disappointment to fans. However, the brand’s stock has risen thanks to the success of House of the Dragon.
Without more information, it’s hard to feel strongly about a Game of Thrones movie. If you’d asked me two years ago, I’d have said there was no point because Game of Thrones had lost its fan base and squandered the massive goodwill it had spent years earning. Then, House of the Dragon landed and was well-liked, and A Song of Ice and Fire is suddenly hot again; don’t ask me to give you the lottery numbers, folks. So, it’s possible a movie can be good and make money, but it depends on how it’s executed. I think the secret will be getting as far away from the show as possible. That’s part of why House of the Dragon was embraced (the other part being that it’s really good); it’s a prequel set 200 years or so before Game of Thrones, so viewers can get involved in the story without having to be reminded of the atrocious ending to its predecessor. (Although they do occasionally have visions or prophecies of what’s to come, and I’d be lying if I said those didn’t irk me.) So, perhaps this will be another prequel; Gary and some others talk about how cool it would be to see Robert’s Rebellion, the war that installed Robert Baratheon as king and led to the events of Game of Thrones. And sure, I’d be up for that, although it may be better as a series than a movie.
That’s the other thing to keep in mind: the Game of Thrones movie will have to be a smaller-scale narrative than the shows because of the time it would take to tell the story of another war. Technically, they could tell a war story again, but after seeing two shows told from multiple perspectives that took their time to slowly build characters, it would feel like a truncated version of the usual Game of Thrones story. The movie would be better off as a more intimate narrative that followed a single character or a handful of heroes. To that end, George R.R. Martin recently blogged about having “pizza and pasta” with Maisie Williams, who played Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, and suggested they were discussing a potential project, though he didn’t reveal any more. This could be almost anything (if there’s one thing Martin loves, it’s committing to literally anything but finishing A Song of Ice and Fire), so I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. But if they want the Game of Thrones movie to be a continuation of the show, and they want to focus it more on one character, Arya would be a good choice. She ended the series sailing off to see the world; she could get into lots of different adventures, maybe struggling between being the faceless assassin and the girl who’d found her humanity again. (That plotline could have been handled much better on the show; maybe the movie could redeem it.) It would feature one of Game of Thrones’ most popular characters and be removed enough from the show and Westeros that we wouldn’t have to be reminded of the ending and how it crushed the souls of millions of fans.
For the record, my ideal Game of Thrones movie would be ninety minutes of all the characters who were alive at the end of season 6 waking up and realizing the last two seasons were a dream, then HBO redoing the rest of the show, but I doubt anyone involved is cool enough to allow that to happen.
Let us know what you think of a Game of Thrones movie in the comments!
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