‘Game Of Thrones’: HBO Gives Spinoffs & ‘House Of The Dragon’ Update

House of the Dragon is coming to HBO this year.

But we already knew that, right? HBO and HBO Max Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys told Deadline that they are currently in talks with the team behind the dragons to figure out exactly when to launch the spinoff fantasy series and admits that the network was cautious about revealing a date before due to the impact of Covid on production.

The prequel series, which comes from George R.R. Martin, Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, has now finished production and fans should expect an update soon. It stars Paddy Considine, Olivia Cooke, Matt Smith, Emma D’Arcy and Fabien Frankel. Rhys Ifans, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best and Sonoya Mizuno also feature.

“One of the reasons why we’re trying to be cautious about it is when you’re shooting a show that big during a pandemic, especially with the last round [with] a lot of crew and cast members… you didn’t know who was going to drop out or if we’re going to have to shut down so we just didn’t want to declare a date and then find ourselves shut down,” he said. “Now that we are out of production, I think that we will talk to their guys and figure out what we want to do in terms of announcing a date. But I was just trying to make sure that we didn’t come out with a date that we couldn’t meet for something that was out of our control.”

Bloys also talked about the other potential spinoffs.

Deadline revealed last March that the network was developing a trio of ideas for new projects set within George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world including 9 Voyages aka Sea Snake, Flea Bottom and 10,000 Ships. Bruno Heller was attached to the Sea Snake project, while Amanda Segel was tapped to write 10,000 Ships.

Steve Conrad is also attached to write a Dunk & Egg prequel series.

Bloys said that there was “nothing really to report there” but admitted that some of these projects are “looking really good”.

“It’s just like any development process. Some are looking really good. Some we’ll see. We’re not going to make everything. I don’t have any mandate that I must make a certain amount of spin offs or prequels or anything like that. We’re really doing it just based on what we’re excited about creatively. I wouldn’t even give you a tease… [that] we might see something this year because I really don’t know, it depends on how the development comes in,” he added.

There are a number of animated projects also percolating.

“Again, I think a lot of those were announced as speculative development… very embryonic development. I don’t even know to tell you the truth that we have a writer attached or anything like that,” he said. “The nice thing is because we control the property you can kind of try different things and see what’s exciting without having to commit… so we’ll let the creative lead us.”

Bloys also confirmed that HBO’s True Blood reboot remains in development and had no new news to share about a potential Harry Potter series that has been rumored about for HBO Max.