Westeros

Very interesting report from Deadline Hollywood‘s Nellie Andreeva following an interview with Franesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. It’s a wide-ranging interview covering a lot of HBO’s shows, but for our purposes, the most interesting tidbits relate to House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, and potential other Westeros shows.

Addressing the on-going production of season 2 of House of the Dragon, Orsi noted that HBO was fully prepared to rewrite and reshoot anything that needed fixing once the WGA strike ends and the writers can take up their pens again to do writing work, but until then they are confident with the completed scripts they had to work with and have not dealyed producation at all. Speaking of a potential season 3 approval, it sounds like they’re not far from giving an immediate go ahead to season 3 to try and improve the turnaround from season to season. That said, how many seasons for the show in total remains a question:

It’s become an increasing trend among creators to have Patreons where they can connect more directly with fans, and with the launch of Highgarden Entertainment George R.R. Martin has joined the bandwagon—but with a twist. As some may know, George has poured time and money into supporting the arts and commerce in his home of Santa Fe, NM. Most notably, he saved the Jean Cocteau Cinema which is now a venue for independent and genre films as well as talks with authors and filmmakers, and opened up his own bookstore, Beastly Books. The Patreon has three separate segments (which can be combined into one offering at a discount): one focused on GRRM, one focused on the Jean Cocteau Cinema, and one focused on Beastly Books.

Variety reports that the science fiction novel Hunter’s Run, co-authored by George R.R. Martin, Daniel Abraham, and the late Gardner Dozois, has been optioned by Exile Content with Mark Raso attached to direct and co-write the English-language script with his brother Joseph. Martin and Vince Gerardis are attached as executive producers, alongside the Raso brothers.

A new year is on us, and with that is news of the next calendar in the long-running A Song of Ice and Fire series. This time, the artist will be none other than Justin Sweet, an award-winning artist whose contributions have been as varied as concept art for blockbuster films like The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Avengers: End Game to illustrations for books like… well, like The World of Ice and Fire, where his two-page splash of Robert and Rhaegar on the Trident (as well as his depictions of Arya, Jon, and Dany) were some of the very first pieces commissioned for the book.

Today is the day: The Rise of the Dragon has hit book shelves in many countries! It’s also available as an e-book ... and even as an audio book, read by the wonderful Harry Lloyd (Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones) which is a particular honor since we’re huge fans of his. We’ve been amazed by the positive response online, especially at the various art previews, and we have to say we owe a lot to all the artists who worked hard to make this what this is. There’s a lot of promotion going on, but one we particularly enjoyed is this trailer from our terrific UK publisher, Harper Voyager:

In the lead up to today’s release, George R.R. Martin took part in an online event where he spoke with friend and author David Anthony Durham to promote the book as well as House of the Dragon. While the stream has not been publicly released as of yet, read below for some of our realtime tweeting of some choice remarks and information from George… including an update on progress on The Winds of Winter!

On October 25th, The Rise of the Dragon: An Illustrated History of the Targaryen Dynasty, Volume One hit shelves. Based on Fire and Blood by GRRM, the book provides a more condensed account of the events documented in that work of “fake history” while providing over 180 new, full-color illustrations (some were shared in the recent, all packaged in a similar format to The World of Ice and Fire. As we said when the book was first announced, the book is for a very particular set of audiences—those who were daunted by F&B’s size but are interested in something more concise, those who love the artwork, and those who are collectors and completists. If you or someone you know fits that, however…

Ahead of the release, George is holding a couple of events, including one that will be livestreamed for those who purchase a ticket. See more details below, as well as an opportunity to get copies with a different set of autographs entirely… !

One of the many new pieces of art Rhaenyra and Daemon Targaryen racing their dragons, Syrax and Caraxes, between High Tide and Dragonstone. By Nutchapol Thitinunthakorn

Today features a very notable birthday. No, we don’t mean Sophia Loren’s (though that’s very fine company to be in). It’s in fact George R.R. Martin’s birthday today, making him 74 years young. Six years ago we were invited to write a tribute to George over at Tor.com, that you can read here. We know fans of his work—and fans of the good he’s done for the genre, for fandom, and for the various good causes he has contributed to—the world over wish him well on this auspicious day.

One of the nonprofit organizations GRRM has been a major supporter of is the Stagecoach Foundation, which he co-founded to help provide training and work opportunities for residents of New Mexico in the state’s burgeoning film industry. A donation to the foundation would no doubt be very welcome, especially today!

George R.R. Martin on the set for his cameo in the Game of Thrones pilot, which was later reshot and lost that footage. He has yet to make a formal cameo on one of HBO’s shows.

Just two months away from the release of The Rise of the Dragon, a book we’ve co-authored that takes Fire and Blood, boils it down to the essentials, and fills the rest of the pages with over 180 pieces of glorious, all-new artwork from artists both familiar and brand new to fans of A Song of Ice and Fire. Random House has started the wheels rolling promoting the book by releasing this video with George R.R. Martin where he talks about the book and its connection to House of the Dragon:

At “Not a Blog”, George R.R. Martin goes into some detail—as far as he’s able—as he confirms the news that a Jon Snow series is in development under the working title of Snow. In the process, he confirms that Kit Harington is the originator of the series (as revealed by Emilia Clarke in a recent BBC profile), that he and his own team of writers and consultants are working with Harington’s team, and that the project has actually been in development nearly as long as projects that we learned about last year rather than being a very new development.

There’s also some Winds of Winter information, as George notes that he was recently “back with Tyrion,” and GRRM also discusses his recent (misconstrued) remarks on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as well as continuing work on short films based on the works of the great Howard Waldrop.

Over at Not a Blog, George R.R. Martin has provided fans a lengthy update on The Winds of Winter, HBO’s successor shows, and more… and in the process lets the cat out of the bag regarding one project we here at Westeros.org have been working on for the last couple of years.

We’ll provide a quick summary below:

The Three Chroniclers, by Chase Stone.

A sit-down with various media outlets has provided some fresh information from Casey Bloys, HBO’s and HBO Max’s chief content officer, regarding the future of the Game of Thrones franchise, from the release date of House of the Dragon to the status of a number of projects in development. While there’s nothing really concrete, the one thing Bloys committed to is that House of the Dragon is definitely airing this year, but that the conversation has only just now started thanks to the show officially wrapping.

We’ll provide a brief bullet point of the main information that came out of the interview with Bloys:

After years of hints, August saw the official announcement by George R.R. Martin that a short film based on “The Night of the Cooters”, written by long-time friend (and one of the funniest writers in the genre) Howard Waldrop, was in production. Now, the result of that adaptation can be glimpsed for the first time in this teaser:

With a screenplay by award-winning author Joe Lansdale, Night of the Cooters stars and is directed by Vincent D’Onofrio, who fans of Netflix’s Daredevil may have very recently glimpsed on the new Disney+ show Hawkeye. Notably, the teaser’s description on Youtube also reveals that Ramin Djawadi of Game of Thrones and Westworld fame composed the music for the film.

As viewers can see, the short film is executed in a merging of live-action and animation, dubbed “Trioscope” by the inventors of the process, Trioscope Studios who made the four-episode WWII drama The Liberator for Netflix.

A spate of reports concerning the FromSoftware’s forthcoming RPG Elden Ring, as the developers have provided game journalists access to previews of the game and interviews with the developers. The game, from a developer already extremely famous for its Dark Souls series, added George R. R. Martin to its creative team when the game first entered development. Now, in an interview transcribed at The Verge, Yasuhiro Kitao from FromSoft reveals that GRRM’s participation was very early on and quite particular.

A newly-released screenshot from Elden Ring.

Back in February, we connected some dots following our stumbling across Vince Gerardis’s Startling Inc. site listing a number of titles that he had in production and development. Among the items there was a note: “Dark Winds at AMC”. We speculated that this was based on Tony Hillerman’s crime novels and that GRRM was involved due to a post he made back in June 2018.

This is now all confirmed thanks to James Hibberd at The Hollywood Reporter:

There’s also a statement from GRRM that Hibberd reports, indicating that Chris Eyre (who directed the accoladed film Smoke Signals) and Robert Redford(!) reached out to ask him to become involved and help bring Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee series to television.

Zach McClarnon as Hanzee Dent in the 2nd season of Fargo

Elden Ring, a game from Dark Souls-developer FromSoftware whose world and story was created in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, now has a release date: January 21st, 2022.  A trailer was also revealed showing some of the gameplay and the amazing environment and character design that FromSoftware is famous for:

The game was first announced this month two years ago, and Hidetaka Miyazaki sat for an interview that discussed just how and why GRRM got involved (TL;DR: he’s a fan of his work from well before A Song of Ice and Fire).