Obviously HBO wants more Game of Thrones . Anytime the subject comes up, they flirt with it, leading to a noncommittal, vaguely favorable comment from A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, who presumably has other projects taking up his time. It’s going to happen, just no one knows how or when. That is until Thursday, when HBO CEO Richard Plepler spoke with The Hollywood Reporter and revealed the concrete steps being taken to develop a Game of Thrones spin-off show concurrent to the airing of the last two seasons of Game of Thrones.
Describing possible “brand extensions” (gross) for Game of Thrones, Plepler said, “Right now we’re focused on finishing the series with the kind of energy and excitement that everyone has come to expect. We’re going to do that while at the same time parallel processing very embryonic stages of other possibilities.”
There’s probably not much point in reading a lot into Plepler’s statement, which only nudges a Game of Thrones spinoff a little more toward reality. Still, it’s interesting how tentative the whole development feels, with “very embryonic stages of other possibilities” indicating development could still go in a lot of directions. It seems HBO really wasn’t hiding anything of great significance over the past year or so of speculation and equivocating.
But while the concept behind the Game of Thrones spinoff may not yet exist, it sounds like HBO will be in-development while Game of Thrones remains on air for Season 7 and Season 8. It could even mean that our time in Westeros goes very nearly uninterrupted, Game of Thrones fading into an endless run of fantasy blockbuster series to rival Disney’s infinite Star Wars.
