Jason Momoa has been cast as Conan the Barbarian in the upcoming film set to begin shooting in March, according to Nikke Finke of Deadline Hollywood. This production should pose no difficulties for Momoa’s role as Khal Drogo should HBO order a season of Game of Thrones, as the production is not likely to start up shooting earlier than April or May of this year, and scenes set in the Dothraki Sea may well be scheduled for later in the production.
Tor have given the Fantasy Hotlist an exclusive excerpt of “The Mystery Knight”, the third novella in the Dunk & Egg stories set in the past of the Seven Kingdoms. The story will be published in the Warriors anthology, due March 16th.
Robert Stromberg, the visual effects supervisor for the Game of Thrones pilot, appears very briefly in this fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the creation of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar. Stromberg served as production designer on the film, and as the film awards season has started his work has been getting serious attention, with a win at the Critic’s Choice Awards and a nomination in the Art Director’s Guild awards (along with Rick Carter) to kick it off.
Stromberg speaks at the 4:15 mark in this video. Blink and you’ll miss it:
Avatar Press has posted its April solicitations, which clarifies some of the issues we noted when reporting the initial solicitation for the first issue in March. Covers will be provided by Felipe Massafera, while Rafa Lopez will provide the interior art. Issue #2 will come in three variants, one of them being an incentive cover. Full solicitation text below:
Dark Sword Miniatures now have the latest wave of George R.R. Martin Masterworks miniatures available for sale on their online store. The figures include Catelyn, Sansa, Sansa with snow castle, Arya, Brienne of Tarth, and Robb all sculpted by Tom Meier. It also includes Jon Snow’s direwolf, Ghost, sculpted by Dave Summers.
HBO has added a new trademark class to HBO, to follow up on the several ranges of merchandise it’s previously applied for. This time around, the trademark—filed January 13th—covers, “Resin figurines; key fobs not of metal; non-metal key chains and key rings; mirrors; picture frames; pillows; plastic sculptures; slumber bags; sleeping bags; toy chests; household goods; all the aforementioned goods featuring content from or related to a television series.” Like the Class 021 trademark filing renewed in December, this one is specifically for “Game of Thrones”, as opposed to the earliest filings which were for “A Game of Thrones”.
General opinion is such trademark activity is standard procedure at HBO these days, and should not be taken to imply that HBO’s definitely intending to go forward with a series based on the A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Excited by his beloved N.Y. Jets’ survival to the AFC Champion, GRRM has placed all the books on his Signed Books sale page on sale, with $5 off all hardcovers, $3 off of all paperbacks, and a deep discount—down to $15, plus book rate shipping—on Windhaven. The only hitch? Your check or Paypal memo must have “LET’S GO JETS” written on it.
The sale lasts until the Jets lose or, if they happen to win the Superbowl, the first day of the NFL draft. See George R.R. Martin’s Not a Blog for more information. If you’re only familiar with the A Song of Ice and Fire series, now’s not a bad time to try some of his previous work. We particularly recommend his wonderfully atmospheric vampire novel, Fevre Dream, soon to be adapted to a comic book miniseries by Avatar Press.
The Daily Record writes about director Tom McCarthy—who directed the pilot for HBO’s Game of Thrones—and his next project, a high school wrestling film titled Win Win which he has written. One aspect covered in some detail in the article is that McCarthy has stated that he’s looking to cast “real people”, and that the lead for the film may well be someone with no previous acting experience. At the end of the article, McCarthy is noted as indicating that, “he had a positive experience casting ‘real people’ when filming the series The Game of Thrones for HBO in England.”
Erroneous title and locations details aside, it’s interesting that McCarthy cites Game of Thrones as a positive experience in regard to casting “real people”. The article does also note that the Win Win shoot will run about seven weeks, from early March into April, so it’s not impossible that if the series is picked up, McCarthy may return to direct one or more additional episodes.
Thanks to maxlongstreet at the A Song of Ice and Fire forum for the pointer.
Daniel Abraham, one of the contributors to George R.R. Martin‘s shared-world Wild Cards series, offers an insider’s look at collaborative process involved in producing one of the books. Suicide Kings, the final book in the latest triad of Wild Cards novels, was published in December. Fort Freak will be the next entry in the series.
Over at Massive Online Gamer, the good folk at the magazine have put together a list of the top ten licensed properties they’d like to see given the MMO treatment. Among them? HBO’s Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series. An interesting idea, though we’re not sure how they could really capture the qualities that make the series so special—family dynamics, dynastic politics, and the brutality of war—within the typical MMO dungeon-crawl model. That said, they make the mistake of claiming the show will air in 2010. We now know that March-April 2011 is the likeliest date.
Over at remarks at the TCA press tour concerning the series. Specifically: “The fantasy is so incidental, it has a very adult tone… You forget it’s fantasy while you’re watching it, and that’s what I love about it.” The writer fears this is a sign of genre self-hatred which could mean bad things about the adaption, but a lively conversation is sparked in the comments pointing out that Game of Thrones in particular, and the series in general, is markedly low in the fantasy quotient to start with, with only a gradual increase.
Also, they point out one of the very next paragraph: “The pilot will employ some CGI, for backgrounds, the story’s ‘direwolves’(a mixture of real animals and CGI) and dragon eggs.’ Emphasis ours. ;) Although, actually, it’s rather curious why the dragon eggs would need CGI rather than using practical effects props…
As we like to point out here, we’ve seen many, many people start their praise for the series with, “I don’t usually like fantasy…” It’s that quality that could make Game of Thrones a hit on HBO, because it’s a series that appeals to a broader audience than just hard-core fantasy readers.
George R.R. Martin posts about getting his own copies of Valyrian Steel‘s replica of Needle, Arya Stark’s sword patterned after the fashion of the swords that the bravos of the Free Cities use. In describing it, he points out that they are a limited edition of 2500. Valyrian Steel has also made Jon Snow’s sword, Longclaw, already available for sale. Next up? Ice, the design of which they’ve previewed.
A nice catch from Daniel, a reader at Winter is Coming, who noted the sale of the litter of Siberian Husky puppies which were used for the Stark children’s direwolf pups. The only thing I can add to that is that from what I was told, two puppies were quite pale/white, and were named Milk and Cream; you can guess which of the pups they represented. The last of the litter appears to have sold six days ago. The photo of the puppy with a link to the original information is below.
While we normally eschew rumors, a commenter named Andrew notes that the studio manager at the Paint Hall has informed him that HBO had been asking about provisionally arranging a five year lease on two of the four “cells” in which the huge building is divided. Each cell is 16,000 square feet (1,487 square meters) in size. Andrew also notes that the pilot sets are presently still standing, and he speculates that the five year deal would be so they could leave sets standing from season to season.
We share this unverified item since it’s quite typical for productions to take long-term leases even in cases where a show may not go beyond a season, since the potential savings if the show is a success could make any penalties if the show comes to an end early seem like a reasonable choice. Showtime’s The Tudors had a similar lease with
Ardmore studios
outside of Dublin, from what we’ve read. On the other hand, at least one past HBO series—Oz—only leased its shooting location on a year-to-year basis, apparently because of uncertainty that it would ever get a following season.Finally, we should note that five years is a fairly standard figure for this sort of production lease. It does not imply that HBO intends either to go five seasons, or to only go five seasons if the show lasts so long.
Michael Lombardo, head of programming at HBO, gave some comments concerning their pilot for George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones after HBO’s panels closed at the TCA press tour and the news was looking very good indeed! Matt Roush of TV Guide was the first to report via Twitter that the executives will see a rough cut in two weeks, and that the dailies looked good. He also confirmed what we’ve previously reported, that more scripts had been written by the Benioff and Weiss writing team.
Then James Hibberd followed up with a detailed account of the remarks from Lombardo. Some salient quotes follow:
Fantasy Flight Games has announced details for the fourth chapter pack in the current Defenders of the North series, The Wildling Horde. It’s a 40 card pack offering twenty brand new cards to use in the game, and will be made available this spring.
Continuing his fantastic series of colorful, whimsical maps inspired by the setting, Ice and Fire forum denizen Other-in-Law has added two new maps to his gallery: The stormlands and the jaw-droppingly detailed map of the Reach. Though speculative, the heraldry of the maps draws from the descriptions provided by GRRM for Westeros.org’s heraldry page as well as those described in the books.
These are some of the neatest bits of fan art we’ve ever seen for the series.