George R.R. Martin rang in the new year with an update on the Game of Thrones universe, but unfortunately, none of his announcements included a release date for The Winds of Winter.
Martin, 75, revealed in a Sunday, December 31, blog post that three animated Game of Thrones spinoffs are currently in the works at HBO. “None of them have been greenlit yet, but I think we are getting close to taking the next step with a couple of them,” he wrote. “When this last round of development started a few years back, we had four ideas for animated shows, with some great talents attached. Writers rooms and summits, outline and scripts followed in due course … but, alas, two of the original projects were subsequently shelved.”
The third animated project is a previously announced spinoff about Corlys Velaryon, a.k.a. the Sea Snake, played by Steve Toussaint on House of the Dragon. While the project was originally supposed to be live-action, Martin said it will now be animated.
“[It’s] a move I support fully,” he wrote. “Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live action version prohibitively expensive, what with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to … well, on and on and on. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation.”
Martin concluded his post by reminding fans that “nothing is certain in Hollywood,” so there’s “no way to know” whether any of these shows will ever air.
Since the original Game of Thrones series ended in 2019, numerous spinoffs have been announced, but so far the only one to make it to air is the prequel series House of the Dragon, which premiered in 2022. Season 2 is set to premiere sometime this year.
A different prequel series starring Naomi Watts filmed a pilot in 2019, but HBO announced later that year that the show would not be moving forward.
In June 2022, Martin revealed that a spinoff show focused on Jon Snow (Kit Harington) was in development, but there have been no further updates about when or if the series will air.
Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of content for HBO and Max, said late last year that the Jon Snow series had not been given the go-ahead. “We always have Game of Thrones scripts in development. We greenlit Dunk and Egg in the spring,” he said, referring to the series order for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is based on Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas. “I wouldn’t say there is anything else in that world that is close to a green light or anything, but we are always working on different scripts and ideas.”
Book fans, meanwhile, are still waiting for the sixth book in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which served as the basis for Game of Thrones. The fifth book, A Dance With Dragons, dropped in 2011. During an October 2023 book event with fellow author Cassandra Clare, an exasperated Martin said he’s “working” on it.
“I’m 12 years late with Winds of Winter, as we know,” he told the crowd. “I’m just going to put it right out there, you guys don’t have to pester me about it.”
