HBO likely won't move forward with its controversial Confederate show

With Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss jumping from HBO to Netflix, it appears it's lights out for their controversial Confederate project.

Benioff and Weiss just signed a $200 million overall deal with Netflix that "wipes Confederate off HBO's books," reports The Hollywood Reporter. Vulture's Josef Adalian further confirms with sources that the show is now dead and won't move forward without Benioff and Weiss.

HBO in 2017 announced plans for this series from the Game of Thrones duo that imagines an alternate timeline in which the southern states seceded from the Union and slavery is still legal in America, immediately sparking controversy and calls for the project to be scrapped. HBO would later say it "screwed up" in its attempt to explain the show's "complicated subject," but while the project was delayed, the network earlier this year insisted this had nothing to do with the outrage.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

HBO Programming President Casey Bloys recently signaled that Confederate would probably be off if Benioff and Weiss landed a deal somewhere else, saying, "anything they have with us would likely not go forward," Deadline reports. This seems to suggest audiences will never Confederate on the screen in any form, barring the possibility that, as Vox's Emily VanDerWerff speculates, Benioff and Weiss try to sell the project somewhere else after HBO's option expires. Then again, as she writes, "why would they?"

For now, Benioff and Weiss are set to work on a new Star Wars trilogy, leaving behind the Confederate and Game of Thrones firestorms for a franchise, clearly, free of any controversy or tumult whatsoever.