Posted in: HBO, Max, TV | Tagged: game of thrones, house of the dragon

House of the Dragon Season 3 Eyeing January 2025 Production Start

Showrunner Ryan Condal shared that they're looking to start production on HBO's House of the Dragon Season 3 this January.

We're going to kick things off with a disclaimer. While this may be an update on how things are looking with the third season of HBO and showrunner Ryan Condal's House of the Dragon, it's actually some good news. Nothing to do with George RR Martin or how well (or not well) he believes things are going. While there continues to be debate among fans over how the action is being split between the second and third seasons – with some believing Season 2 was a lot of build-up that went nowhere while others argue that Season 3 will make the build-up worthwhile. Of course, we won't know who's actually right until the "Game of Thrones" prequel series returns – and now, we have a pretty good idea of when production will be getting underway.

During the latest edition of his and David Mandel's (Veep, Seinfeld) The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of podcast (which you can check out above), Condal offered an update on how things were looking – including an early production timeline. "2025 is gonna be utter madness from January like third until deep in the fall when we wrap production. We do [have a production start date]; I don't want to say it because it'll be a thing, but it's first quarter, 2025." In terms of what viewers can expect, Condal teases that the best is yet to come. "I will say this is the best season to come. There is… it is as outlandish as Leavesden Studios has been with our show to date. We've outlandished ourselves this time around. So plenty to see; it will be a good one."

House of the Dragon: Condal Defends "Blood & Cheese," Maelor Changes

Conveniently enough, a bonus episode of the show's official podcast dropped in the midst of all of the finger-pointing and posts disappearing from back in September, one that saw Condal addressing a number of questions regarding bringing "Fire & Blood" to live-action life. Here's what Condal had to say in defense of the decisions made regarding "Blood & Cheese" and Maelor:

"Blood & Cheese": "I stand behind the adaptation of how the plot unfolded. I have talked about this quite a bit, but I will just say it in plain text: the children that we had in the story were simply too young to be able to construct that narrative exactly as laid out in the book. Period. I have lots of experience working with very young performers. To ask two four-year-olds to play through that level of drama; it's just not a realistic expectation.

There's also a practical element around the things that you can expose young children to on a film set. Yes, you can do clever cutaways, and dummies, and all those things. We wanted this to be a very visceral, subjective experience, not something that was very 'cut-y' and with closeups. And when you start actually breaking apart what happens in that room, and the things that are said, and the things that are done, it became such a challenge to think about and mount that we started looking for—what are the base elements of this story, that Daemon and Rhaenyra send assassins into the Red Keep, and as a result the king's child and heir [is] murdered—and how do we dramatize that in a way that's exciting, and visceral, and horrifying, and do it in the best way possible?"

Losing Maelor: "And Maelor, if he were born yet in this version of the the television timeline, would have been an infant because of the age of Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. Frankly, this goes back to our first season and trying to adapt a story that takes place over 20 years of history instead of a story that takes place over 30 years of history. We had to make some compromises in rendering that story so that we didn't have to recast the whole cast multiple times and really lose people. It was a choice made. It did have a ripple effect, and we decided that we were going to lean into it and try to make it a strength instead of playing it as a weakness."

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!