It’s been a well-known fact over the last few months that a wide variety of Hollywood studios and content creators have been—and this is a technical, insider-y, very industry term we’re using here—extremely horny for former Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Despite the way the pair’s reputation among the show’s fans has, let’s say, dipped after its final season on the air, that doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on the industry, which only sees two guys who wrote the majority of episodes of one of the most gob-smackingly popular TV shows of all time. (Comments about the actual written content of those scripts notwithstanding.)
Now, at last, the bidding war for the duo’s attentions and affections (in the form of an overall development deal) has broken, and the winner—as it often is when the question is “How much money can we throw at shit that mostly just sounds like a good idea?”—is Netflix. Nobody’s talking numbers, but the general assumption is that Benioff and Weiss got at least as much as some of the streamer’s other big-deal creators—including folks like Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, and Kenya Barris, none of whom have probably even met a dragon, so sad—so we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million, at least.
In exchange, Netflix gets…well, whatever Benioff and Weiss want to make next (provided it’s not a Star Wars trilogy, because they’re already on the hook for one of those). Nobody really knows what that looks like yet, although we’re just going to go ahead and assume that this deal means the final death knell for the pair’s much-mocked “Hey, what if slavery was still going on?” series Confederate—perhaps our first clue that The House That George R.R. Martin Built, And Then Two Other Guys Came Along And Adapted maybe wasn’t actually automatically too big to fail.
Anyway, this whole thing is a beautiful testament to the power of stories, just like our old pal Tyrion always said. In this case, said story just happens to include the mystical power to get these two dudes a hundred million bucks.