“Game of Thrones” Heading to the Big Screen With Aegon the Conqueror Movie in Development
Westeros is coming to the Cineplex.
Warner Bros. is officially at work on a movie based on George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic, specifically about King Aegon I Targaryen’s conquest of Westeros. Befitting the scale and scope of the world Martin conjured and the 8-season run of Game of Thrones and the two prequels that have followed it, House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the movie aims to be as grand and ambitious as possible. Writer Beau Willimon, fresh off a highly successful run with Tony Gilroy’s excellent Andor on Disney+, is slated to pen the script. The Hollywood Reporter teased the news in a recent profile of Martin.
It’s an interesting time for this long-awaited big-screen version of Martin’s epic to start development, given that Paramount is in the process of buying the studio. Yet when asked what his favorite HBO show was, Paramount’s boss David Ellison said Game of Thrones, and adapting Martin’s richly layered fantasy world for the big screen would be an emphatic way to start releasing Warner Bros. properties for its potential new home.
Aegon I conquered most of Westeros roughly 300 years before the events in Game of Thrones and 200 years before the events in House of the Dragon, establishing the mighty Targaryen dynasty. Using his dragons, Aegon was able to unite six of the seven kingdoms (excluding Dorne), and is a major demarcation point in Martin’s timeline, forming BC (Before Conquest) and AC (After Conquest).
A Game of Thrones film has always seemed like a no-brainer—the series itself was so wildly ambitious and sprawling that a big screen adaptation had been floated more than a decade ago. GoT showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff had pitched HBO on a cinematic way of ending the series—three feature films. That obviously never came to pass, and the series ended where it began, with the series finale on HBO on May 19, 2019.
Now, however, it seems like Warner Bros. is ready to unleash the dragons on movie screens across the country and the world.
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Featured image: Game of Thrones. Courtesy HBO.
