In the wake of the announcement of Game of Thrones being renewed for a 3rd season (which George R.R. Martin also commented on), Northern Ireland Screen has confirmed that the production will continue to be based in Northern Ireland. Th show will receive funding from the Northern Ireland Screen fund supported by Invest NI and part funded by the European Regional Development Fund. Shooting will take place in the Paint Hall film studio, the new sound stages in Belfast, the Linen Mill Film Studios in Banbridge and various other locations throughout Northern Ireland.
George R.R. Martin has posted about the Season 3 renewal, and he adds some interesting information: the number and working title of the episode he’ll be writing for that season, while apparently confirming that it’ll be a 10 episode season:
Like the first two seasons, it will be ten episodes long. This one will cover (roughly) the first half or thereabouts of A STORM OF SWORDS, the third novel in the series.
I’ll be writing the seventh episode, with the working title “Autumn Storms.”
Having planned to run this last week just before the premiere, and then just after the premiere, and then when we had the renewal news, and then this past weekend… and, look at that, there’s renewal news!
Well, it’s finally live: the last interview from our trip to the international press junket in London in late February, where we talk with executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss. I’d met David before when I visited the set back during the filming of the first season, and I’d spoken to the both of them during an interview around that time as well, but it was the first time meeting Dan… and yes, he’s just as much One Of Us as you can imagine, geek boys and girls; check out the question regarding the shirt he was wearing!
This just in from HBO:
LOS ANGELES, April 10, 2012 – HBO has renewed GAME OF THRONES for a third season, it was announced today by Michael Lombardo, president, HBO Programming.
“Series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss raised our expectations for the second season – and then surpassed them,” said Lombardo. “We are thrilled by all the viewer and media support we’ve received for the series, and can’t wait to see what Dan and David have in store for next season.”
Based on the bestselling fantasy book series by George R.R. Martin, GAME OF THRONES is an epic drama set in the world of Westeros, where ambitious men and women of both honor and ill-repute live in a land whose summers and winters can last years. The Emmy®- and Golden Globe-winning fantasy series began its ten-episode second season Sunday, April 1 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET/PT), with other episodes debuting subsequent Sundays at the same time.
Among the early critical praise for the second season, Newsday called GAME OF THRONES “the best show on television,” while the Los Angeles Times termed the series “a cinematic feast” and “masterful.” The Wall Street Journal hailed the show as “magnificent” and USA Today called it “near perfection.”
According to early data, GAME OF THRONES’ season two premiere has already accumulated a gross audience of 8.3 million viewers, and is on track to easily surpass the season one average of 9.3 million viewers.
Season two cast members include: Emmy® and Golden Globe winner Peter Dinklage, Michelle Fairley, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Aidan Gillen, Iain Glen, Kit Harington, Richard Madden, Maisie Williams, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Sophie Turner, Jack Gleeson and Alfie Allen.
Season two credits: The executive producers of GAME OF THRONES are David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Carolyn Strauss, Frank Doelger; co-executive producers, George R.R. Martin, Vanessa Taylor, Alan Taylor, Guymon Casady, Vince Gerardis; produced by Bernadette Caulfield.
If you consider yourself a “super-fan” of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire—if you can recite the names of all of Walder Frey’s sons while standing on your head, or have an amazing costume as Mord the Jailer, or have made up a tune to “The Rains of Castamere”, or have painted Jaime Lannister riding a horse down a cliff while declaiming epic poetry as he plays the high harp with one hand and cuts down a White Walker with the sword in his other hand, have covered yourself in house sigil tats, or had a wedding where “The Rains of Castamere” also featured —then Sky Atlantic’s very cool Thronecast program wants you to get in touch to possibly be featured in a future episode.
And if you’re in the London area? Probably even better for your chances to get on! If you’d like to volunteer and be considered for the program, contact Thronecast at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Please read for more information about the issues the forum and the wiki have been having lately.
As you probably know, the TV show leads to spike in traffic that lead to intermittent outages. We have slowly been working to reduce the frequency of these. However, last Friday new problem cropped up: msnbot spiders were slamming the server with hundreds of requests per second. If you Google, you’ll see that this is a common problem that other webmasters have had to deal with for their own servers, but it was a new experience for us. We thought we had mostly fixed the problem… only to have something new crop up, which may be connected to potential hardware failure.
The last few days we and our host have been spending a huge amount of time trying to track down what is going wrong, but as of yet we have not found a solution. We’ll keep trying, but right now we do not have an ETA for when the problems may be fixed.
The second episode of season two, The Night Lands, pulled a 3.8 million viewership on the initial airing according to James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly. This is a very slight dip from the 3.9 million for the first episode, and given that it was a holiday weekend as well as typical post-premier drop-off it has to be considered a good sign.
Our detailed recap, analysis, and book-to-screen breakdown—plus some extra material in the form of a short video Linda and I have prepared providing some background for those who haven’t read the books and our take on the highs and lows of the episode—can now be found over at our episode page!
It’s almost done, alas, but catch the last minutes of this panel from Olympus Eastercon featuring George R.R. Martin—as well as David Anthony Durham, Tricia Sullivan, Joe Abercrombie, Genevieve Valentine—as they discuss the nature of heroism in genre literature:
They should be posting the full recorded panel soon after it ends, so we’ll update accordingly when that’s available.
At 2PM Eastern today, CNN’s The Next List will be airing a 30-minute episode focused entirely on the work of David J. Peterson (Dedalvs on Twitter), creator of the Dothraki language on HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Leading up to it, CNN has posted up some clips featuring remarks from executive producers David Benioff & Dan Weiss, as well as star Emilia Clarke, regarding the importance of the language to the show. Here’s one of them:
It’s worth noting that the Next List blog also contains guest posts from Peterson, touching on the topics of creating languages and the history of invented languages in Hollywood. Well worth reading!
More amazing streaming from Eastercon! This time, George R.R. Martin is being interviewed for about an hour and a half, with questions coming from blogger Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone.
The annual World Science Fiction Society awards—the Hugo Awards—are to be revealed in September, and at Eastercon we’ve found out just who the final nominees are in the categories. And of course, some of the nominations will be interesting to fans:
Congratulations to one and all! For a full list of the nominees, see here.
Tune in now to UStream to watch George R.R. Martin, his wife Parris McBride, Gail Gerstner-Miller, John Jos. Miller, Pat Cadigan, Paul Cornell, and David Anthony Durham discus the origins of Wild Cards in the old Superworlds RPG, and where it is today.
Good stuff!
This is quite cool—Eastercon is live streaming selected panels via UStream... and right this moment they’re streaming Miltos Yerolemou (Syrio Forel) going through fight choreography (with a friend of ours, no less—Jo, a historical re-enactor, member of the Brotherhood without Banners, and an all-around awesome person). John Bradley (Samwell Tarly) is also on hand!
It looks like the next panel being streamed from Eastercon will be a Wild Cards panel featuring George R.R. Martin, so stay tuned!
So, everyone hoped for word that HBO was happy with Game of Thrones and would announce on Monday morning that it was ordering another season. Or, as last year, maybe it’d be a day or two more - Tuesday or Wednesday.
Now it’s Friday… and nothing. What’s happening?