A Game of Thrones: The TV Series

For years, many George RR Martin fansites have been speculating on what would happen if the Song of Ice and Fire novel series were turned into a series of films or a TV series. What would stay in, what would get cut out, who would play who, etc. It was always laughed off as a game. After all, no-one would ever, ever be insane enough to even attempt this, would they?

From Variety.
From Chud.com.
From DarkHorizons.com

Apparently they would. HBO, which has turned out edgy, innovative, big-budget drama serials for years now, have decided to go for it. Their plan is to adapt each of the seven novels in the series into a TV season. Whether this would be a standard American TV season (22-25 episodes) or the 10-episode season format that HBO favours for some of its projects (like Rome, which returned for a second season last week) is unclear. They've already hired two screenwriters and George RR Martin has agreed to both serve as executive producer and also pen one episode of the first season. Martin himself is an experienced screenwriter, working on The New Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast in the 1980s, and the news he is taking an active role on the project has been well-received by fans, although not without concern. Book Five of the series, A Dance with Dragons, is expected to be published before the end of the year, but there are two more books (The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring) to come and a minimum of four-to-five years to get there. However, between fully greenlighting the project, pre-production, production and publicity, it looks like the TV version of A Game of Thrones will not be aired until 2009 or 2010 at the earliest, giving GRRM plenty of time to complete most of the remaining work on the novels before the TV series gets underway.

"They tried for 50 years to make 'Lord of the Rings' as one movie before Peter Jackson found success making three," Martin said. "My books are bigger and more complicated, and would require 18 movies. Otherwise, you'd have to choose one or two characters."

Already, the fansites have been erupting with ideas for the proposed series. However, as GRRM has already said, HBO have merely bought the rights to the series. Although they have detailed plans on how to proceed and have already assigned writers (and pretty prestigious writers at that, including the author of hit novel and Spike Lee movie veryThe 25th Hour, David Benioff), the series has yet to be fully greenlit. In my view, this could be a very successful project. There are issues, such as the needed buget being colossal, rivalling or exceeding that even of Rome, if not Band of Brothers, but overall the approach that HBO is taking is very reassuring. Expect this to be one topic to run and run over the next few years.