HBO Greenlights Pilot For ‘A Game Of Thrones’ Fantasy Series
November 12, 2008 by tcgames
HBO has given the greenlight to film a pilot based on George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy novel series A Song of Fire and Ice. The show will be titled A Game of Thrones, named after the first novel in the series. Martin has planned seven books in the series, and the plan is to turn each book into a full season of television.
David Benioff (25th Hour, Troy), who is executive producing the series with D.B. Weiss (I Am Legend Prequel), says that “High fantasy has never been done on TV before and if anybody can do it, it’s HBO. They’ve taken tired genres and reinvented them — mobsters in The Sopranos and Westerns with Deadwood.” While supernatural and sci-fi have boomed in recent years, it does seem extremely odd that the fantasy genre hasn’t been tried in primetime, especially considering the huge box office and critical success of the Lord of the Rings films. The only fantasy television series that comes to mind is Xena: Princess Warrior, and that was syndicated and… uh, bad.
Sure, dragons, magic, and even swords cost money (Thrones has all three), but in the last decade sci-fi television shows have pushed the boundaries in the visual effects department. The producers claim that Thrones is more character centric, and most of the action takes place off screen – a formula that has worked well for Battlestar Galactica.
Source: /film
I cant wait for this series to come out on HBO hopefully they do the books justice.
If anyone can do this right, it’d be HBO. Bring it on!!!
A television series of a fantasy book series as massive in scope as George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is a brave undertaking. The writers selected have excellent credentials, so that is encouraging. This is a very intricately plotted book series, however, with several dozen fascinating characters interacting with each other in highly imaginative ways. Simplifying the multiple plotlines without sacrificing the rich subtleties of characterizations will be quite a challenge. I really hope HBO pulls this off so that other excellent fantasy series would be considered for production as well.
song of ice and fire is not a book ,it is another world ,you don’t read it ,you devoured it,you are there