HBO’s “House of the Dragon” will end after four seasons, showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal revealed in a Monday press conference.
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The third season of the “Game of Thrones” prequel series is currently being written, Condal told press. The Season 2 finale just aired (and streamed on Max!) on Sunday night. Condal expects to begin production on Season 3 sometime in “early-ish” 2025.
While it was suspected that “House of the Dragon” might only last four or five seasons, this is the first time Condal has confirmed a definitive end. George R. R. Martin, who is a co-creator on “House of the Dragon,” wrote in a 2022 blog post that he expected the series would need roughly four seasons of 10 episodes each in order to fully tell the story of “Dance of the Dragons” from his book “Fire & Blood.” HBO’s drama chief Francesca Orsi also previously said she expected “House of the Dragon” would run for a minimum of four seasons. She recently (officially, it was never in doubt) picked up a third season.
At the presser, Condal was also asked what we might expect, episode-count-wise, from these subsequent seasons. All he said was to not expect too many changes to the formula.
“Without saying anything, because I haven’t had discussions with HBO about it, I would just anticipate the cadence of the show, from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will continue to be the same from Season 2 on,” Condal said.
Season 1 was 10 episodes; Season 2 had eight.
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Condal did tease a bit of what he’s excited about working on for Season 3. The war is coming to a head at this very moment in the story; Condal said this just-wrapped season was “largely a metaphor for a nuclear conflict.” The best stuff is still to come, he promised.
“If Season 2 was the the arming of the sides and the Cold War, with moments of actual conflict and explosion, I think Season 3, really, you do start to see things boil over from here to the end of the war,” he said. “So as always with this show, there’s going to be giant moments of spectacle, but also real moments of surprise and character nuance that we’re very much looking forward to. And I think really, some of my favorite moments in the book are, just as a reader, that I’m excited to adapt as a dramatist are yet to come in the story.”
Condal previously said he felt Season 3 would be the biggest challenge in finding fresh storylines.
“There’s a rhythm to all this, these kinds of stories as you tell them,” Condal said. “And we’re trying to find satisfying arcs within the season structure. So, hopefully you start with a bang, and then you build to another bang through the series, but you’re really trying to arc out the characters, so that each season is a different experience for all of them. And then you leave them off all in a place where you can pick up with them next year, and then take them in a new direction, because you don’t want to end up in that place where you’re doing the same thing again and again.”
“House of the Dragon” has continued to be a major hit for HBO, with the premiere providing the biggest premiere in Max history, but only because when the first season premiered even bigger, the service was still called HBO Max .
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