HBO
"Game of Thrones" may soon be getting the big screen treatment.
On Thursday, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, citing unnamed sources, reported Warner Bros. Discovery was developing a "Game of Thrones" movie. It is unclear whether the film will be based on the original series or tell a different story.
A representative for Warner Bros. Discovery did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The reports aren't a surprise. HBO, Warner Bros.'s television network, spent millions making "Game of Thrones" and was rewarded with one of the biggest TV franchises of the 2010s. "Game of Thrones" won 59 Primetime Emmys and had a huge audience that grew with every season.
George R.R. Martin first suggested a "Game of Thrones" movie to tie up the franchise in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He also said the prequel novella series "Tales of Dunk and Egg" could work on the big screen.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners of the hit show, told The Wall Street Journal in February that they wanted to finish "Game of Thrones" with three theatrical movies, but HBO rejected the idea.
After the series finale aired in 2019 and fans ached for more stories, HBO planned multiple TV spin-offs. Only "House of the Dragon" has aired, but it has been a smash hit like "Game of Thrones."
HBO
Matthias Frey, the head of the Department of Media, Culture and Creative Industries at City, University of London, told Business Insider that a "Game of Thrones" film is a "no-brainer."
"'Game of Thrones' had one of the most loyal and passionate fan bases of any media franchise for the last 20 years," he said. "In addition, it attracted a broader mass audience of non-fantasy fans who were intrigued by its secondary genres or simply wanted those 'water cooler' moments of being able to discuss what everybody else was watching."
Shawn Robbins, director of analytics for movies at ticketing company Fandango and the founder of insights firm Box Office Theory, agreed that a "Game of Thrones" film would be a success. He pointed to the season four finale episodes that were released in US theaters for a week in 2015. They grossed $1.8 million at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
"A big screen iteration would be the perfect fit for a fictional universe with such scale, intrigue, and drama," Robbins said. "There's tremendous opportunity in bringing this IP to the biggest canvas possible as moviegoers increasingly gravitate toward event-level content."
HBO
Warner Bros. Discovery has had a year of ups and downs at the box office. It produced three of the biggest blockbuster hits of 2024 — "Dune: Part Two," "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire," and "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" — and co-produced the "Twisters" reboot, which made $370 million.
Their other summer blockbusters, "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" and "The Watchers" underperformed, surpassing their estimated production budgets by a few million dollars.
Amid these failures, Deadline reported in July, citing unnamed sources, that Warner Bros. Discovery made another round of layoffs on the production, business affairs, and finance side of the company.
The biggest failure of the year was "Joker: Folie à Deux," the sequel to the billion-dollar 2019 movie "Joker," which has made $201 million so far. Variety reported the film had an estimated production budget of $200 million.
Frey said that the "Game of Thrones" movie could be a "last-ditch move to shore up their base with a reliable franchise" after their recent misfires.
Since David Zaslav became the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022 after Warner Bros. and Discovery merged, he has said that his focus for the company is expanding its major franchises, such as "Harry Potter," DC, and "The Lord of the Rings."
Warner Bros. Pictures
A "Harry Potter" TV series reboot was announced last year after the box office failure of the "Fantastic Beasts" spin-off series. Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" and Matt Reeves' "The Batman" universe have also jumped to the small screen with "Dune: Prophecy" and "The Penguin."
Frey said franchises that extend across different media are popular in the industry right now.
"The name of the game in today's media landscape is to create transmedia story worlds and cross-pollinate brands across a variety of media formats in order to create a monetization pipeline," he said.
"Warner Bros. Discovery's decision to produce a 'Games of Thrones' film is part of its strategy to double down on reliable IP in an age of ongoing change and disruption in the media industries," he added.
