1st Game of Thrones spinoff will finally arrive in 2022, HBO predicts

Winter is coming back in just about two years, according to HBO.

The network is eyeing a 2022 launch for its Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, HBO President of Programming Casey Bloys said this week. The HBO boss told Deadline "my guess" is the show will be on the air sometime that year.

House of the Dragon is set to follow House Targaryen about 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones, and it's based on George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood. HBO originally had another Thrones spinoff in the works starring Naomi Watts, which shot a pilot in 2019. But the network decided not to move forward with it in favor of House of the Dragon.

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

So what went wrong with that other spinoff, and why did HBO move forward with this Targaryen one? Bloys told Variety that "there's nothing I would point to and say 'Oh, this was the problem'" with the scrapped spinoff. But Bloys did say that while there were "challenges" with the Watts project because it was to take place thousands of years in the past and "required a lot more invention," with House of the Dragon, "there was a text from George and there was a little bit more of a roadmap."

While Martin himself says he'll be involved in House of the Dragon "to some extent," he has promised readers he won't write for the show until he finishes The Winds of Winter, his long-delayed Thrones novel that, almost nine years since the last book, still has no release date.