Dragons have returned to HBO.
A new trailer for the long-awaited Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon has been released.
The series takes place 200 years before the events of the original series, which became HBO’s biggest hit of all time and the most Emmy-winning drama of all time.
The new series comes from writer George RR Martin (based on his book Fire & Blood) and co-creators and showrunners Ryan Condal (Colony) and Miguel Sapochnik (Finch).
Dragon stars Paddy Considine (Peaky Blinders) as King Viserys Targaryen, Olivia Cooke (Ready Player One) as Alicent Hightower, Emma D’Arcy (Wanderlust) as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, and Matt Smith (Doctor Who) as Prince Daemon Targaryen.
HBO is technically calling the new footage a teaser trailer, though the network previously released an official teaser trailer in October and this clip is larger.
The series, which premieres August 21, is a major initiative for HBO, which hopes to recapture some of the magic of Game of Thrones, which grossed more than $1 billion during its 2011-2019 run . The company also has several other prequel projects set in the world of Westeros in various stages of development, and House of the Dragon doing well would bode well for GoT’s ability to transform from a one-of-a-kind hit series into a franchise .
There is some headwind, however, as the content market has become much more crowded in recent years, fantasy shows far outnumber them (Netflix’s The Witcher, Amazon’s Wheel of Time), and the series will compete with another major fantasy launch: Amazon’s big- Budget The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which premieres just 12 days after Dragon. Still, the GoT brand is impressive, and with HBO already scrapping an expensive false start (another Thrones prequel project starring Naomi Watts, which filmed a pilot in 2019), the network has shown its determination to get its follow-up right.
previously asked Sapochnik how the upcoming drama’s look, feel and tone will differ from the original series.
“I think we respected the original show a lot,” Sapochnik said. “He wasn’t broke, so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. House of the Dragon has its own tone that will evolve and develop as the show progresses. But first, it’s very important to show respect and homage to the original series, which was quite groundbreaking. We stand on the shoulders of this show and we’re only here for this show. So the most important thing for us is to respect this show as much as possible and try to complement it instead of reinventing it. And I was involved in creating the original series, so I feel like that was useful. I don’t come up and say, ‘Let’s change everything! Let’s do another color palette!’ No, I really like the color palette.
“Even so, we can’t say, ‘Well, when we did Thrones, that’s how we did it…'” he added. “If you start every sentence with that, you’ve lost. This is different and should be different. It’s a different crew, different people, different tone. Hopefully it will be seen as something different. But it has to be earned – it doesn’t happen overnight. Hopefully fans will enjoy it for what it is. We’ll be lucky if we ever get close to the original show, so we’ll just put our heads in and move on, hoping that what we come up with is worthy of a Game of Thrones title. “