6 Years Ago Today, HBO Cancelled an Exciting Fantasy Series After Spending $30 Million on the Pilot Episode

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HBO has long been trying to build on the success of Game of Thrones, which is what gave us House of the Dragon, but it also led to a very expensive failure: the pilot for what was known as Bloodmoon (its working title), a Thrones prequel that would’ve taken place thousands of years earlier, showing Westeros during the Age of Heroes and showing how the first Long Night came about – or, in other words, solving the mysteries of the White Walkers that Game of Thrones didn’t.

Besides the White Walkers, and the chance to show the ancient history of some key families, like House Stark, the prequel seemed to have a lot of other things going for it. It was co-created by George R.R. Martin himself alongside Jane Goodman, whose franchise bona fides were proven with things like X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, Kick-Ass, and Kingsman: The Secret Service. The cast was impressive, led by Naomi Watts and featuring the likes of Miranda Richardson, Denise Gough, Naomi Ackie, and Jamie Campbell Bower. And, oh yeah, HBO was confident enough to spend a reported $30-35 million on the pilot.

Why Did HBO Cancel Bloodmoon & Was It The Right Call?

Given the expenditure, and the desire to turn Game of Thrones into a true franchise, you’d be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that the Bloodmoon pilot was a disaster of epic proportions for HBO to cancel it. However, that wasn’t necessarily the case. In 2020, Casey Bloys (then HBO’s programming president and now CEO) spoke about the show on the Television Critics Association press tour, revealing there wasn’t one specific problem with it:

“I think Jane did a beautiful job, it was a big challenge but there was nothing that I would point to and say, oh, that one element did not work, just overall it did not quite gel. That’s one of the reasons when we started out to think about ‘Is there a life after Game of Thrones in terms of Game of Thrones’, we purposefully developed multiple projects. We would have been very lucky to do one pilot, have that pilot go and be a success but in development as you know, it takes a lot of tries to get it right, this is no different.”

Those sentiments were later echoed by Robert Greenblatt, who was chairman of HBO’s parent company WarnerMedia when Bloodmoon was cancelled, in an interview with THR: “It wasn’t unwatchable or horrible or anything. It was very well produced and looked extraordinary. But it didn’t take me to the same place as the original series. It didn’t have that depth and richness that the original series’ pilot did.”

Other reports were not so generous, however. Not long after its cancellation, TVLine reported that the production had long been “troubled,” and that HBO execs had seen a cut of the pilot, requested heavy edits, and still weren’t pleased with the results. It also included alleged creative differences and budget issues, though none of this has been confirmed by the network.

A big part of the problem for HBO was the lack of source material. The entire history of the Ages of Heroes and Long Night isn’t really more than a few pages; there’s no book to adapt here, and not many fleshed out characters or events. That’s not inherently a good or bad thing, but clearly made it more difficult for the network to get things right. That can also be evidenced by the prequels that have moved forward so far: the same day that Bloodmoon was cancelled, the network confirmed it’d ordered House of the Dragon, based on Martin’s Fire & Blood, to series. The next spinoff will also be a proper adaptation, taking on the author’s The Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas.

The cancelled Bloodmoon pilot is a fascinating “what if…?” and also a curious case of “what’s it really like?” The original Game of Thrones pilot was infamously terrible, so much so that the bulk of it was re-shot, and yet HBO still couldn’t save Bloodmoon. Some images of the show were revealed on social media (and swiftly deleted), and it looked impressive. We’ll never get to see what it was like, unfortunately, but given HBO was happy to cut its losses, that suggests it was the right choice – or at least, it wasn’t a safe bet. I’d still love to see something happen with the ideas behind the show, but with how good the next spinoff looks (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms), the franchise is in pretty good shape anyway.

Game of Thrones is available to stream on HBO Max.

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