“Game of Thrones” author and franchise creator George R. R. Martin still has to get around to finishing the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book saga, and it’s not clear if the sixth novel “The Winds of Winter,” let alone a seventh and final one, will get released.
In the meantime, he’s still dealing with HBO’s assorted screen adaptations of his work, with the newest, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” arriving this Sunday. In a new THR feature-length interview with Martin, updates were revealed on where things stand with the various shows.
First up, and as previously reported, the Jon Snow sequel series appears to be dead. Star Kit Harington was working with two writers on a story in which Snow was “living alone as a broken man with PTSD”.
They add he had chased away his direwolf Ghost, thrown away his sword Longclaw, and was now spending time building and destroying log cabins. Harington “also wanted Jon to die and to avoid being a hero”. HBO thought the premise was “too much of a bummer”.
Instead, their focus has shifted to another sequel series from writer Quoc Dang Tran (“Drops of God”) and says: “One possibility is shifting the drama to the Mediterranean-like land of Essos and adding another hugely popular legacy character – Arya Stark.”
Also under consideration is the animated Sea Snake project, and “Aegon’s Conquest,” which could either be an HBO series or a “massive Dune-sized feature film for theaters”.
As for “House of the Dragon,” Martin got very forthright about where things stand with that series, telling THR that his working relationship with showrunner Ryan Condal is “worse than rocky, it’s abysmal”.
He says things went fine through the first season, but on the second season the relationship broke down. The trade’s sources say things came to an end a meeting over the third season in which Martin disagreed with Condal’s ideas and allegedly said, “This is not my story any longer.”
The author was asked to step back from the third season, only to be “brought back aboard” some months later. Martin says he can’t talk about his involvement at present.
