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Ten Thousand Ships: Playwright Eboni Booth Penning New HBO Pilot: GRRM

George R.R. Martin confirmed that playwright Eboni Booth was penning a new pilot script for "Game of Thrones" spinoff Ten Thousand Ships.

In the latest edition of Not a Blog ("Awards Season"), GRRM congratulated playwright Eboni Booth for winning this year's Pulitzer Prize for her play Primary Truth. After understandably questioning why the Pulitzer Prize medal would have an image of Ben Franklin as opposed to Joseph Pulitzer, had a very interesting detail to add regarding Booth's current writing gig. "She's [Booth] an amazingly talented young playwright and a joy to work with; when not writing and producing her prize-winning plays on- and off-Broadway, she has been kept busy by me and HBO, working on a new pilot for TEN THOUSAND SHIPS, a GAME OF THRONES spinoff about Nymeria and the Rhoynar. 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."

That's an interesting development, considering that it was reported back in May 2021 that Amanda Segel (Person of Interest, Helstrom) was set to write the series "10,000 Ships." Since that time, it seems the series title was changed to spell out the number "Ten Thousand Ships" but not much else. There were rumblings off and on that the project may have been shelved, but nothing ever official. Based on what GRRM had to share earlier today, it appears Ten Thousand Ships is getting another chance – this time, with Booth at the pilot-writing helm.

The project's title is a nod to the journey made by warrior queen Princess Nymeria and the surviving members of the Rhoynars, who journeyed from Essos to Dorne following their defeat by the Valyrian Freehold in the Second Spice War. In terms of "A Song of Ice and Fire," the story takes place approximately 1,000 years before the novels.

GRRM No Fan of Filmmakers Trying to "Improve" Books

Good news, FX Networks and series co-creators, executive producers, and writers Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks' Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai, and Hiroyuki Sanada-starring Shōgun! Your series has a huge fan in GRRM. Bad news, showrunners for "nine hundred ninety-nine out of a thousand" film and/or series adaptations from books that are currently in play – especially those who look to make what they're adapting "their own." In a recent Not A Blog post ("The Adaptation Tango"), GRRM flashed back to a 2022 joint event that he participated in with Neil Gaiman – and one of the big topics that the duo addressed was their distaste for film and series creators who make changes to the books that they're adapting just for the sake of being able to say that they left their personal signature on it. Spoiler? They weren't fans of it. And two years later, GRRM doesn't think that things have gotten better.

"Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and 'make them their own," GRRM writes. "It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and 'improve' on it. 'The book is the book, the film is the film,' they will tell you as if they were saying something profound. Then, they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse."

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