Products You May Like
A new Game of Thrones spinoff based on George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk & Egg novellas is reportedly in development, but risks repeating the main show’s problem in adapting the source material. Game of Thrones came to an end with season 8 back in 2019, but that wasn’t the last viewers have seen on Westeros. Unsurprisingly, given the unprecedented success of the show, HBO is looking to produce multiple spinoffs. A pilot was previously filmed for a show tackling the events of The Long Night, but HBO decided not to press forward with it. House of the Dragon, centered around Targaryen Civil War the Dance of the Dragons, has been ordered to series, with Martin serving as co-creator alongside Ryan Condal (Colony), with the latter serving as co-showrunner alongside acclaimed Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view.
It’s expected the House of the Dragon will debut in 2022, but that isn’t all HBO has in the works for Martin’s fantasy world. The network wants to end up with multiple shows set in the universe, not unlike what is happening with Marvel and Star Wars on Disney+, which is particularly important as HBO Max aims to continue making waves in the streaming world. Among the spinoffs reportedly in the works is Tales of Dunk & Egg, set around 90 years before Game of Thrones. Following hedge knight Dunk, aka the future Ser Duncan the Tall, who becomes Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and his squire, Egg, the will be King Aegon V Targaryen, the books chart their journeys around Westeros, documenting their early lives before the characters assume their great responsibilities.
Dunk & Egg has long been a popular choice for a Game of Thrones spinoff, which is understandable because, as well as being entertaining stories, there is some existing source material. Martin has so far written three novellas – The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword, and The Mystery Knight – but therein lies the rub. The biggest problem Game of Thrones had was that it overtook Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books; once it ran out of source material is when the wheels started to come off. Part of that was down to adaptation choices, cutting several characters and storylines, but it also spoke to the difficulty of adapting something unfinished. Tales of Dunk & Egg is in a similar position: Martin hasn’t written a story since 2010, despite planning at least six of them in total, meaning that, unless something drastically changes, the spinoff would be working from incomplete blueprints if it were to go ahead.
Given how much going beyond the books hurt Game of Thrones, it is a little surprising that HBO would risk repeating the issue. That’s particularly true as Martin himself has been hesitant to allow any adaptation of the Dunk & Egg stories for this very reason. He has said over the years that he wishes to write anywhere from 6-12 novellas, which would allow him to tell the full life stories of the two central characters. However, since Martin has been focused on The Winds of Winter, as well as the Targaryen history Fire & Blood (which serves as the basis for House of the Dragon), then there’s been no progress on Dunk & Egg. On his Not A Blog in May 2017, after it was reported that several Game of Thrones spinoffs were in the works (one of which was The Long Night), Martin wrote:
We’re not doing Dunk & Egg. Eventually, sure, I’d love that, and so would many of you. But I’ve only written and published three novellas to date, and there are at least seven or eight or ten more I want to write. We all know how slow I am, and how fast a television show can move. I don’t want to repeat what happened with GAME OF THRONES itself, where the show gets ahead of the books. When the day comes that I’ve finished telling all my tales of Dunk & Egg, then we’ll do a tv show about them… but that day is still a long ways off.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that Dunk & Egg will make it to series, or if it does, it may not be for several years. But given Martin has yet to deliver The Winds of Winter, and still has A Dream of Spring to come after that, as well as commitments to House of the Dragon and a second volume of Fire & Blood planned, it seems unlikely there’ll be another Dunk & Egg book in the next few years, much like the story being completed. Perhaps Martin himself realizes that finishing anytime soon is unrealistic and, like Game of Thrones, is willing to map out the ending as far as he knows, allowing for an adaptation to happen. That didn’t work out for Game of Thrones though, and Dunk & Egg has even less published material to work with, making an adaptation harder. The stories are already shorter and lighter than A Song of Ice and Fire – so there’s a balance to strike in making a show without ending up doing what happened with The Hobbit movies, stretching them out and altering the tone – and that becomes harder if the books do remain unfinished.