Westeros

Back in 2018, it was announced that George R.R. Martin‘s novella-turned-short-YA-novel, “The Ice Dragon”, had been optioned by the Warner Animation Group (now known as Warner Bros. Pictures Animation) as a possible feature film. Since then, occasional updates from GRRM have revealed it has stayed in development all that time, with his most recent update last year indicating that author David Anthony Durham—a writer of historical and fantasy fiction, and also a contributor to Wild Cards—was working on the script.

However, in the last year or two, the animation division of WB has been going through a similar belt-tightening as other divisions of what is now Warner Brothers Discovery. When the news came three weeks ago that a completed animated feature, Coyote vs. ACME, from WB Pictures Animation was cancelled, it made us revisit the Starling Inc. site of GRRM’s media production partner Vince Gerardis, as The Ice Dragon had been listed there for years. It was, at that time, still listed as an Upcoming project.

But it seems that’s no longer the case, a change that seems to have happened no later than November 25th.

Now, other projects that were once listed on Startling’s page, like Ten Thousand Ships or Nine Voyages, were removed… only for George to say afterward that neither of these projects were actually cancelled, they were just not in active development at that time. For the Game of Thrones-related TV shows, this makes sense: as House of the Dragon and now Knight of the Seven Kingdoms were greenlit,  HBO would pull back on other projects while waiting to see how those did, but that’s no reason to throw them out entirely since who knows what the future would bring.

And it may be the case here as well, that The Ice Dragon remains at WB but not in active development at this time while WBD continues to work on its finances and considers how to proceed with its future projects. When we hear more, we will update this story.