HBO has officially green-lit the first of several planned spin-offs to their hit fantasy series, Game of Thrones. On Monday, writer George RR Martin offered more details about the show, noting that it would be set thousands of years before the events of GoT.
“Yes, this is a prequel, not a sequel,” Martin wrote on his blog. “None of the characters or actors from Game of Thrones will appear in the new show. All of the successor shows we’ve been developing have been prequels, as I have mentioned before. This one really puts the PRE in prequel, since it is set not ninety years before Game of Thrones (like Dunk & Egg), or a few hundred years, but rather ten thousand years (well, assuming the oral histories of the First Men are accurate, but there are maesters at the Citadel who insist it has only been half that long).”
Martin said that the title for the new show hadn’t been decided yet, but his vote was for ‘The Long Night’, but he said that “HBO would want to work the phrase ‘Game of Thrones’ in there somewhere.”
Jane Goldman will serve as the showrunner, and Martin will be co-creator. The writer also provided an update about the other planned spin-offs. “As for the other successor shows,” he wrote, “if you have been following along, you know that we started with four, and eventually went to five. One of those has been shelved, I am given to understand, and of course Jane’s pilot is now moving to film. But that does not mean the others are dead. Three more GAME OF THRONES prequels, set in different periods and featuring different characters and storylines, remain in active development. Everything I am told indicates that we could film at least one more pilot, and maybe more than one, in the years to come. We do have an entire world and tens of thousands of years of history to play with, after all. But this is television, so nothing is certain.”
Martin is currently writing the sixth series in the Song of Ice and Fire, which has suffered numerous set backs because of his work on the show. Originally planned to be published in 2015, the book will not be released until 2019.
Game of Thrones will end after its eighth season, due out in 2019, and HBO has been actively planning another show to fill the void. GoT has become HBO’s most successful original show, drawing in over 30 million average viewers across all platforms in Season 7.
(PHOTO INPUT:- FACEBOOK/GAME OF THRONES)