Back in April, Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland revealed details about his pitch for a Game of Thrones prequel that HBO ultimately passed on. Now, according to Thrones author George R.R. Martin, a Pulitzer-winning playwright has joined the prospective new HBO series.
The series—variously referred to as Ten Thousand Ships and 10,000 Ships—has been in the ether since at least 2021, but you can go all the way back to 2014 to find Martin’s mention of a written project of the same title, focusing on Princess Nymeria, seen as a folk hero by later Westeros figures like House of the Dragon’s young Alicent and Rhaenyra, and “the final fatal war between the proud princes of the river and the dragonlords of old Valyria.” Today, Martin shared that Eboni Booth—who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama earlier this year for her play Primary Trust—has now come aboard HBO’s Ten Thousand Ships.
According to Martin, she is “working on a new pilot,” so expect a shift from Helgeland’s tease of what he would have brought to the table. In April, he told Inverse that “I think they felt the period of my show was too far removed from the pillars of the original … My script was based on Queen Nymeria and this little blurb about her that was in a Westeros encyclopedia. Essentially, it was the story of Moses but swapping him out for Nymeria. Her country gets ruined and her people are forced to live on the water, which is why the show was called 10,000 Ships. They end up having to leave and find a new home like the Israelites leaving Egypt. She’s leading all these people, trying to hold everyone together but things are always in danger of falling apart as they travel around a fictionalized version of the Mediterranean, looking for a new home to settle in.”
In today’s tease, Martin describes the show as “a Game of Thrones spinoff about Nymeria and the Rhoynar,” which isn’t much to go on, but adds “We’re all very excited about this one… though we’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to pay for ten thousand ships, three hundred dragons, and those giant turtles.”
Speaking of dragons—though not nearly that many—House of the Dragon season two premieres HBO and Max this Sunday, June 16. The next Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, is teased by the network as “coming soon;” based on Martin’s “Dunk and Egg” stories, it’ll be a prequel set after House of the Dragon, but 100 years before Game of Thrones.
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