Game of Thrones Franchise Continues to Evolve With Movie in Production
Westeros will go to the big screen in a new Game of Thrones movie.
Since 2011, Game of Thrones has been the defining franchise of HBO. And as the channel’s famous slogan taught us, HBO is not TV.
The latest Game of Thrones project is about to take that slogan seriously. According to The Wrap, a movie based on the George R. R. Martin books has gone into production. The screenplay will be written by Beau Willimon, former showrunner for the Netflix series House of Cards and a writer on Andor. The film will be the latest continuation of a franchise that seeks to expand beyond books and television to become an enduring pop culture powerhouse.
Game of Thrones began life as the 1996 novel A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, which was followed by four more full-length novels through 2011 and several novellas and companion books. The series launched a host of comic books, board games, video games, and other media, but it truly became a pop-cultural sensation with the release of Game of Thrones on HBO in 2011. Even though the show ended on a down note with the unpopular eighth season in 2019, new shows House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms have renewed interest.
Impressive as all of that is, Game of Thrones still doesn’t have the reach of, say, Star Wars or even Lord of the Rings. Which is to say, that it doesn’t have a movie, the one last entertainment sector left untouched by Martin’s work. Clearly, HBO and its studio Warner Bros. can change that.
Still, the question remains: what will the movie be about? Martin has certainly given adapters plenty to work with, and Warner could even create new versions of the stories covered in the TV series, in the same way that the studio is readapting the Harry Potter books with a new cast. But with so much lore from the books untapped, it seems most likely that Willimon will explore some aspect of Westeros unseen on TV.
The most obvious choice would be the conquest of Aegon I, which has long-been rumored as the subject of a movie. Aegon I Targaryen a.k.a. Aegon the Conquereror established the world of Westeros as we know it. With his two sisters and three dragons, Aegon took control of six of the seven kingdoms and was the first to sit upon the Iron Throne. The Targaryen dynasty flows from him, and every Game of Thrones show has been in his shadow. Few events in the history of Westeros are more deserving of the big screen treatment.
The conquest of Aegon isn’t necessarily the most exciting story in the franchise’s history, as it just involves regular people getting smooshed and burned by dragons. But, then again, the HBO series became a sensation by showing horrible things happening to people, so maybe that’s exactly how Game of Thrones will conquer the movies the way it conquered the TV screen.