On Friday, HBO gave a pilot order to one of its five Game Of Thrones spin-off projects, specifically one coming from George R.R. Martin and writer Jane Goldman that’s set thousands of years before the events of the show. Today, Martin has been teasing the project a bit on his website, confirming some details and offering some hints about what the show will be about if HBO decides to bring it to series. He says the show “really puts the PRE in prequel,” noting that the setting will be “ten thousand years” before the show. He also says he’d like to call the show The Long Night—a term that has been used on the show and implies a connection to the White Walkers—but he expects the network will want to put Game Of Thrones in the name somewhere. (The Long Night: A Game Of Thrones Story would work, but that’s pretty wordy.)
Also, while Martin is the one doing this teasing, he’s also makes a point to highlight that Goldman is really doing most of the work on this. She’ll be the showrunner if it goes to series and she wrote the pilot script that HBO greenlit, so we’ll start being completely dismissive of Martin’s contributions from this point forward in order to balance things out. Speaking of which, shouldn’t George R.R. Martin be writing some book anyway? Goldman probably had to do most of the work on this project because he’s such a big slacker.
On another note, that lousy layabout also says that one of the five Game Of Thrones spin-offs has been “shelved,” meaning HBO won’t be moving forward with it. Since Goldman’s show has a pilot, that leaves three—all of which are about different characters in different time periods—still in the running. Martin believes HBO will film at least one more pilot “in the years to come,” so unless none of these work out, we’ll be seeing plenty more Game Of Thrones stuff on TV.