Although the end of Game of Thrones in 2019 dovetails directly with the news that HBO was in development for a series of spinoff series led by source material author George RR Martin, 2024 only feels like the beginning of a GoT attack. House of the Dragonthe only show to go before cameras (aside from an entirely different pilot that was shot and scrapped), returns for season 2 this summer. A Knight of Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, an adaptation of Martin's Dunk and Egg story, has been greenlit with lofty goals to arrive before the end of the year. A Jon Snow series might still be in the works? Easy to believe, but there are no officially announced plans.
But Martin, a writer who likes to draw epic conclusions, continues to pique fans' interest with updates on everything else that may or may not be happening in HBO's Max-driven Westeros universe. And the most recent update involves a show that apparently moves at a clip: Nine tripsa naval war themed spider that follows Lord Corlys Velaryon and was mentioned earlier The sea serpentwhich was planned for live-action, but will now take the form of an animated series.
In a message at his personal siteMartin notes Nine trips was planned on the scale of Game of Thrones And House of the Dragonbut as development progressed with showrunner Bruno Heller (Rome, Gotham), it was clear that the vision was priceless. “The need to create a different port every week,” Martin writes, “from Driftmark to Lys, from the Basilisk Isles to Volantis, from Qarth to… well, and so on. There's a whole world out there. And there is a much greater chance that we can show it all with animation. So we now have three animated projects running.”
The animated version of Nine trips joins two other untitled animated Game of Thrones projects in development. Martin notes that none of them have currently been greenlit by HBO/Max, but adds, “We're close to taking the next step with a few of them.” It's unclear if they're all destined for Max premieres; later this year, Warner Bros. Pictures to release a fully animated Lord of the Rings movie, The War of the Rohirrim, in theaters. The right Thrones story could make the same play.
The choice of animation over live-action hasn't shaken Martin's enthusiasm for the story, and if anything, it makes him even more excited about the possibilities of adapting even more of his A Song of Fire and Ice stories. And that's because George RR Martin rightly stans Netflix's Blue-eyed samurai. Polygon's #2 show of 2023, Blue-eyed samurai refined classic samurai styles with modern action choreography and dimensional drama. We ate it and so did Martin.
“I hardly know where to begin,” he writes. “Once we started watching it, we couldn't stop (…) it's violent, visceral, sexy (and more than a little kinky in places), with great action sequences and a cast of well-developed characters, colorful and complex and real. Flawed heroes, villains that are more than cartoons (although they are cartoons after all). It reminded me of some books I read… what was the title of that series? Something with a song…'
Blue-eyed samurai shares a remarkable bond with Game of Thrones: Jane Wu, who oversaw the animated series and choreographed much of the action, designed set pieces for both the original series and House of the Dragon. And her work on the live-action series, which required massive amounts of storyboarding and pre-visualization animation, inspired her to reverse engineer her process for Blue-eyed samuraiin which she attempted to direct for live-action and then adapt into cartoons with French studio Blue Spirit.
“I got this idea through (our main) person,” Wu told Polygon last November. “She's biracial. So I wanted this production, when you watch it, to feel like it's a great mix of both animation and live action. I wanted to show that there is strength in that diversity.”
In Martin's eyes, the bar is up Nine trips and the other Thrones animation project is set.
“But if it does happen, with one or two or all three shows, I hope we can make them as good, beautiful and moving as Blue-eyed samurai,” he writes. “We will definitely try.”