HBO Spent $30 Million on a ‘Game of Thrones’ Spinoff Pilot That Will Never Air

While HBO works on a flurry of new Game of Thrones content in the years to come, there’s one spinoff project that didn’t quite make the cut. Just this week, the streamer announced that Steve Conrad has been hired as writer and executive producer of spinoff series Dunk & Egg, with prequel series House of the Dragon already in the works. But the first spinoff series announced by HBO will never see the light of day, even though the pilot was already shot — which means WarnerMedia has tossed a huge chunk of change thanks to the thick production budget.

HBO has lost $30 million thanks to the scrapping of the first Game of Thrones spinoff, which was apparently too bad to air or even fix, for that matter. According to former WarnerMedia entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt, the single episode cost the network millions to produce.

“They had spent over $30 million on a Game of Thrones prequel pilot that was in production when I got there,” Greenblatt said in the new HBO book Tinderbox, per Insider. “And when I saw a cut of it in a few months after I arrived, I said to [HBO boss Casey Bloys], ‘This just doesn’t work and I don’t think it delivers on the promise of the original series.’ And he didn’t disagree, which actually was a relief.”

Greenblatt continued: “So we unfortunately decided to pull the plug on it. There was enormous pressure to get it right and I don’t think that would have worked.”

The axed Game of Thrones spinoff was meant to come from writer Jane Goldman and director S.J. Clarkson. The cast included Naomi Watts in a lead role. Although plot details were largely kept under wraps, HBO teased the spinoff as “the world’s descent from the Golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour,” and that “Only one thing is for sure: from the horrifying secrets of Westeros’ history to the true origin of the white walkers, the mysteries of the East to the Starks of legend..it’s not the story we think we know.”

And yet, the spinoff never came to fruition. Greenblatt noted the mistakes made, making sure they would not happen again as HBO began working on House of the Dragon.

“I’m the one who encouraged Casey to greenlight it to series,” Greenblatt said. “I said, ‘Let’s not risk $30 million on a pilot.’ You can’t spend $30 million on a pilot and then not pick it up. So I said, ‘Let’s not make a pilot. Let’s get a great series that we feel good about, and just make it. Or not.’”

House of the Dragon will debut on HBO in 2022.

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