Westeros

An interesting blast from the past, courtesy of Paul Moore’s Inverse interview with acclaimed screenwriter Brian Helgeland. Way back in 2017, HBO hired writers to develop successor shows to Game of Thrones, and Helgeland was among those named. Helgeland would go on to refer to the project in development the year after, but details remained thin as to what exactly he worked on.

Well, they are thin no longer, as this quote from the interview shows:

Princess Nymeria as depicted by J.K. Drummond for The World of Ice and Fire, the “Westeros encyclopedia” referred to be Helgelnd.

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As it happens, we’ve known that Helgeland’s was the 10,000 Ships writer, but it’s interesting to note that more recently word was that a new attempt was being made on the same matter, with Amanda Segel taking a crack at it in 2021.

Frankly, Helgeland’s pitch sounds very interesting, and the story of Nymeria and the 10,000 ships always seemed to us like good fodder for a show, as we discussed back in 2017:

While we don’t know the status of Helgeland’s or Segel’s scripts at HBO, we do know that back in 2022 Starling Inc.—Vince Gerardis’s production company that is attached to all of George’s projects—removed 10,000 Ships from its “In Development” list, only for George to note the next year that it was in fact still in development. With Segel or Helgeland at the time, or someone else entirely? We still don’t know. But this is what Helgeland has to say: