On the heels of its Season 2 finale, “House of the Dragon” fans can expect another two seasons from the “Game of Thrones” spin-off series.
While the “GoT” prequel series has only been renewed for a third installment thus far, showrunner Ryan Condal noted in a Monday press conference that the team is aiming for four seasons total for “House of the Dragon.”
Writing is already underway on Season 3, according to Condal, and is slated to begin production in early 2025 after prep starts this fall. Though Condal said he hasn’t had discussions with HBO about the episode count for Season 3, he said he would “anticipate the cadence of the show, from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will continue to be the same from Season 2 on.”
After the Season 2 finale left off with Team Black and Team Green’s newly built up armies preparing for battle — namely, the Battle of the Gullet, which Condal said the team delayed until the next installment to give the moment its time in the sun — Condal confirmed the war will come to a “big head” in Season 3.
“If Season 2 was the arming of the sides and the Cold War with moments of actual conflict and explosion, I think [in] Season 3, you do start to see things boil over from here to the kind of the end of the war,” Condal said.
He also teased that Season 3 will include both “giant moments of spectacle” as well as “real moments of surprise and and character nuance,” which will come in “equal measure.”
“If it’s all just dragons fighting dragons, we would get bored and bankrupt very quickly,” Condal said. “You have to have both in equal measure and make the character moments count, so that [when the] dragons do fight — and they will fight again — you care about the dragons and the people riding them.”
With several new dragons introduced in Season 2 — including a sneak peek of Prince Daeron Targaryen’s dragon, Tessarion, in the finale — the showrunner teased that “there are more dragons that exist in this world that we have maybe mentioned, but haven’t necessarily seen.”
The Season 2 finale also left off on a cliffhanger with Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) considering an offer from Alicent (Olivia Cooke) to take the Iron Throne peacefully while Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) is away. Looking to Season 3, Rhaenyra must decide whether to trust Alicent, while Alicent is confronted with immediate guilt for consenting to Aegon’s death, should Rhaenyra take up the offer.
“We’re leaving the season with these two women who … went into that scene with one interpretation of things have come out with a radically different interpretation,” Condal said. “We wanted to end with the thought of, ‘What are they going to do next?’ ‘Where has the world left them?'”
“House of the Dragon” Seasons 1 and 2 are now streaming on Max.
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