It was taken for granted that, after a first season of ten episodes in the style of the beginnings of Game of Thrones, The House of the Dragon would continue the story with a second with the same volume of deliveries. It won’t be like that. As reported by the Deadline portal exclusively, HBO has reduced the order to eight episodes and, in exchange, would have already renewed the series for a third season.
From HBO they report that the minor order is due to creative reasons: the story will benefit from having the next dramatic arc in eight episodes. And, from the news portal, they maintain that the current showrunner, Ryan Condal, with the help of G.R.R. Martin, who acts as an advisor to the series, reconsidered how to structure the entire story of The House of the Dragon during the pre-production of the second season, which has to be shot this coming summer.
The result was the following: part of the plot that was supposed to cover the second season will be transferred to the third, including one of the most important battles (and, therefore, that require a large budget). But, in this way, the HBO channel and the Warner Bros. Discovery company make sure to extend the prequel set in Westeros, at least, until four seasons.
Until now, there had been speculation about the duration of the series, which was estimated to have three or four seasons. In fact, the author of the literary universe, Martin, had declared that he was delighted to have “10 hours each season to tell our story” and that he should have “four whole seasons of ten seasons” to do justice to the “Dance with Dragons” , as the Civil War is called in the Targaryen clan for the Iron Throne, two centuries before the events that occurred in Game of Thrones.
At an industrial level, in addition, Condal’s decision has its advantages (and perhaps for this reason history has been restructured). Warner Bros. Discovery is in the midst of cutting expenses due to the company’s losses: $2.1 billion in the last quarter of 2022, including $217 million from its streaming services, even after the local and global success of The Last of Us. from HBO and the video game Hogwarts Legacy.
While The House of the Dragon is one of the crown jewels of their catalogue, a reduced season allows them to have a similar television impact but at a lower cost. The episodes of the first season had a budget of almost 20 million, so in its second season it will save approximately 40 million.
And when should the second season arrive? It is expected that in the summer of 2024, following the new contemporary logic of the great television productions of leaving two years between seasons such as The Rings of Power and Stranger Things. In part, this wait is due to the preparation of the scripts, the greater complexity when it comes to organizing and executing the shoot, and the need for more months of post-production to finalize the visual effects. In addition, this way the platforms keep the asset alive in their catalogs for longer.
