With Kit Harington announcing that his Jon Snow sequel show has been put “on the shelf,” now’s a good time to take stock of all the Game of Thrones spinoff series: the living, the dead and the dying.
Earlier this week, Game of Thrones star Kit Harington revealed that HBO would not be moving forward with a sequel series about his character Jon Snow. “Currently, it’s off the table, because we all couldn’t find the right story to tell that we were all excited about enough,” he said. “So, we decided to lay down tools with it for the time being. There may be a time in the future where we return to it, but at the moment, no. It’s firmly on the shelf.”
This was a blow to Game of Thrones fans who wanted to see what happened to Jon Snow after the end of the show. Did he live with the wilds? Did he ever see Sansa or Arya again? Did he feel like coming south and trying to claim the Iron Throne? We may well never know.
In fact, if Harington had his way, we would never have known that this sequel show was in development at all. The reality is that, since Game of Thrones ended in 2019, HBO has worked on a number of spinoff ideas, some of which went forward, some of which are dead for good, and some of which are still in limbo. With the Jon Snow developments, it seemed like a good time to check in on the state of all things Game of Thrones spinoffs. How many shows exactly have HBO developed, and what are the chances we’ll see any of them on our TV screens?
Already happening: House of the Dragon
This first one is easy. Based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, House of the Dragon is set over 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones and tells the story of the Dance of the Dragons, a sectarian war fought between rival factions of the Targaryen family over who gets to sit the Iron Throne. The first season was a success and the second will return on June 16, in just a couple of months.
Definitely happening later: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight
HBO has officially ordered this one; it will film this year and probably be on our screens sometime in 2025. It’s even cast the two main roles: that’s Irish actor Peter Claffey as Dunk and child actor Dexter Sol Ansell as Egg above.
And these are the only two Game of Thrones spinoffs we know for sure are definitely happening. Everything else is speculative:
In development: Aegon’s Conquest
Aegon the Conqueror, the first in a long line of kings named Aegon Targaryen, took over Westeros with his sister-wives Rhaenys and Visenya about 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones. His is a pretty good story that I could see making for entertaining TV. Apparently HBO thinks so too, because they’ve hired writer Mattson Tomlin to develop the idea.
Keep in mind: this does not mean that we are definitely getting an Aegon show; HBO has attached writers to several spinoff projects only for them to never come to fruition. But there has been buzz around this particular idea lately. I can see this one going on the air after House of the Dragon has wrapped up, to continue the adventures of the silver-blonde dragon-riding incest enthusiasts who have so captured the hearts and minds of viewers.
“In development”
Now we come to several shows that were announced at one time or another but about which we haven’t heard anything in a while. Are they continuing to be developed in the quiet of a back office at HBO headquarters? Have they been shunted aside and no one bothered to say anything? Let’s run down the list:
The Sea Snake and 10,000 Ships
The Sea Snake is another name for Corlys Velaryon, the middle-aged lord played by Steve Toussaint we meet on House of the Dragon. On that show, Corlys is the head of the richest house in Westeros. But how did he get that wealth? The Sea Snake show will explore that question, walking alongside Corlys in his younger years as he embarks on nine voyages to the far corners of the world, making trades that will set him up as the richest man alive.
As for 10,000 Ships, that one will follow Nymeria of the Rhoynar, a leader who lived back in the time when the Valyrian Empire was at its height. Unable to fight the Valyrians and their dragons, Nymeria loaded her people onto ships and landed them in what is now Dorne in Westeros, subsequently marrying into the powerful Martell family. Her story definitely has the shape of an exciting TV show.
I’m grouping these two shows together because, at one point, we heard they had both been set aside by HBO. But George R.R. Martin disabused that notion with a post on his Not a Blog.
“The Nymeria show is still in development. So is the Sea Snake show. And there are others,” he wrote in 2023. “How many will get the greenlight like Dunk & Egg? Impossible to say. How long will it take? It depends. No one knows for sure.”
It’s true: technically, no one knows for sure when or whether these shows will see the light of day. It’s been while since we’ve heard anything official about The Sea Snake or 10,000 Ships, so if they do materialize, it probably won’t be for a long time.
At least two animated series set in the Game of Thrones universe
HBO isn’t limiting itself to live-action Game of Thrones spinoffs. We’ve heard of multiple animated spinoffs in development at one point or another. For one of them, all we know is that it’s an animated drama “similar in tone” to Game of Thrones. That could mean pretty much anything; conceiveably, it could even be an animated retelling of Game of Thrones itself. The mystery persists.
We’ve also heard that HBO was working on an animated show set in the Golden Empire of Yi Ti, a distant land modeled after ancient China. We barely hear anything about Yi Ti on either Game of Thrones or in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books, so if this show ends up happening, the writers will have a lot of license to fill in the blanks.
Robert’s Rebellion
Other than House of the Dragon and Dunk and Egg, one of the most obvious stories in the Game of Thrones canon to be adapted for TV is Robert’s Rebellion, the war that ended with Daenerys Targaryen father the Mad King getting booted from the Iron Throne and Robert Baratheon taking his place. This story involves younger versions of a lot of characters we got to know on the show, including Ned Stark, Jaime Lannister and Stannis Baratheon, so it seems like a natural choice.
But when HBO was first developing spinoff ideas, Martin said they weren’t doing anything with Robert’s Rebellion, since he planned to reveal everything worth knowing about the event by the time he was done writing his Song of Ice and Fire series. Of course, that’s taking forever, so who’s to say HBO won’t want to take a crack at it in the meantime? We have heard they’re working on something, and that they even considered drafting Rome creator Bruno Heller to develop the idea. But that was back in 2021, and it’s hard to know what, if anything, has changed since then.
On the shelf: Snow
This brings us back to Snow, which Harinton said was “on the shelf.” A lot of these series are probably experiencing something similar. They haven’t been formally axed, but there may not be much practical difference between a formal cancellation and an internal decision to stop devoting resources to a given idea to the point where it gets put on the shelf and forgotten. This doesn’t mean the Jon Snow show, called Snow by some fans, can never happen, but it’s probably best to treat it like that. Otherwise you’ll just get your hopes up for a train never gonna come.
Probably dead
In that vein, there are another couple
Flea Bottom
At one point, HBO was developing a show set in Flea Bottom, the poorest district in the city of King’s Landing. We don’t know what that show would look like. A high-stakes drama about characters trying to escape poverty? A slice-of-life family drama? Reportedly, HBO wasn’t sure either, which might have been of the reason they canceled it.
