The projected Game of Thrones prequel, tentatively known as The Long Night or Bloodmoon, is no longer happening at HBO, who have somewhat surprising decided not to order the aviator to sequences. The news of The Long Night’s cancellation came as WarnerMedia launched its HBO Max streaming service, and where it was also announced that another Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, would be moving to series.

The Long Night, or Bloodmoon as its working name announced it, was the first Game of Thrones spin-off series to have a pilot episode dictated. Co-created by Jane Goldman and George R.R. Martin, with the former writing the dialogue and expected to serve as showrunner of a prospective series, the demonstrate was just going specified thousands of years before the events of the main establish, detailing the time known as the Age of Heroes, which then generated mode to The Long Night – the fabled engagement between the affiliated obliged of the First Men and Children of the Forest against the White Walkers. It promised to answer a number of mysteries about the Game of Thrones foes, and had an impressive cast led by Naomi Watts, which utters government decisions not to progress beyond the pilot all the more startling.

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The core reason for HBO not moving forward with The Long Night is so that they can instead focus on the House Targaryen prequel, which was recently confirmed by Martin himself to have a pilot order, and has already been been picked up to series. Co-created by Martin and Ryan Condal, it’ll too have Miguel Sapochnik( responsible for, among others, “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Air of Winter”) as lead for variou episodes and co-showrunner alongside Condal. Telling the story of the Targaryen reign, utilizing Martin’s Fire& Blood book as a basis, it’s easy to see why HBO prefer this to The Long Night: it offers more of the same. The Westeros here is just different enough while still recognizable, with most of the major homes in place, while feuding categories and political machinations abound, and, of course, there’ll be fortunes and a lot of dragons( and, er, incest ).

As HBO reviews to not only build upon Game of Thrones incredible success, but too make a big splash with HBO Max, then a prequel focused on House Targaryen, rather than one that’s distanced from the demo by thousands of years, feels like a surer pot in terms of delivering what the gathering misses( or at least, what they think it requires ). On top of that, there have also been reports that The Long Night faced a number of post-production issues, including a re-edited trimmed after a poor receipt, and some problems while filming in Northern Ireland. Of route, that’s not uncommon: the first Game of Thrones pilot was infamously cruel, but on that occasion HBO decided to reshoot it and push forward. This time, with the safety net of another streak, then that wasn’t a risk they needed to take.

House of the Dragon, which is set to build up to the Targaryen Civil War known as the Dance of the Dragons, is a splashier line that can more instant have key Game of Thrones iconography in it( alongside dragons, there’ll too be the Iron Throne after Aegon’s Conquest of Westeros is shown ), which is ultimately a better sell to WarnerMedia execs and general gatherings alike, specially when The Long Night was having creation problems.

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Read more: screenrant.com