[Spoilers for Game Of Thrones season eight episode six.
In a comically terse new interview with HBO’s Casey Bloys, The Hollywood Reporter managed to wring one notable bit of information from the network’s tight-lipped programming president: We will never, ever see Arya’s swashbuckling adventures west of Westeros.
“Nope, nope, nope,” he replied to a question about a possible sequel series. “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.”
He concludes, “[A] sequel or picking up any of the other characters doesn’t make sense for us.” That leaves it to us, then, to imagine what a kingdom under the rule of an all-knowing, otherworldly weirdo will look like, and just when Drogon will return to torch their fur-laden asses into oblivion.
Bloys also confirms George R.R. Martin’s previous statement about there being two Game Of Thrones prequels in development alongside the Naomi Watts-starring prequel series that’s slated to begin filming next month.
That series, Bloys notes, will not be impacted in any way by the mostly tepid response to the Thrones finale. “There’s no scenario where [screenwriter] Jane [Goldman] saw the episode 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.”
Bloys calls the finale we got “beautiful,” but acknowledges that “there’s no way for the guys to have landed this plane in a way that would have made everybody happy and they’re not out to make everybody happy.” A good thing, then, that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are venturing into the Star Wars universe, a franchise brimming with welcoming, open-minded fans.