HBO’s programming president Casey Bloys did a post-Game of Thrones finale chat with the Hollywood Reporter. He gave updates first on the prequel series already in the works, “I am not clarifying anything other than yes, we shoot the first pilot in June. There are two more in development and beyond that, there’s nothing else to report..”
We’re shooting the pilot in June, you can do the math and figure out when it would be on the air. What I’m not doing is working backwards by saying, “This has to be on the air by this date.” We want to do the best show possible. This is a pilot, so we’re doing it the old-fashioned way, which is shooting a pilot. My expectation is it will be great and we’ll move forward and it’ll move along on a regular TV timetable. I don’t want to speculate any dates.
…There’s no scenario where [screenwriter] Jane [Goldman] saw the [Thrones finale] and said, “Oh, I better change this, that or the other thing.” We’re trying to have a show that feels like its own show within the universe but we’re not trying to replicate the same show. It’s not the same characters, it’s not the same dynamics. It’s not like we’re taking the existing show and saying, “X, Y and Z worked, so let’s do that.” It’s a different writer, creator and different feel and different world.
Then he was asked directly whether Arya’s ending meant we would see a spinoff with Maisie Williams. His reply was extremely certain:
Nope, nope, nope. No. Part of it is, I do want this show — this Game of Thrones, Dan and David’s show — to be its own thing. I don’t want to take characters from this world that they did beautifully and put them off into another world with someone else creating it. I want to let it be the artistic piece they’ve got. That’s one of the reasons why I’m not trying to do the same show over. George has a massive, massive world; there are so many ways in. That’s why we’re trying to do things that feel distinct — and to not try and redo the same show. That’s probably one of the reasons why, right now, a sequel or picking up any of the other characters doesn’t make sense for us.
