George R.R. Martin is founding a new content kingdom at HBO.
The Game of Thrones author just signed a massive overall deal to develop more programming for the network and its streaming service, HBO Max. Sources say Martin’s contract spans five years and is worth mid-eight figures.
The news comes on the heels of a surge of Game of Thrones prequels being put into development. All told, the network has five projects based on Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy world in the development stage and one ( House of the Dragon ) that’s been greenlit to series.
The four-time Emmy winner is also developing for HBO the series Who Fears Death (an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s award-winning 2011 postapocalyptic novel) and Roadmarks (an adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s 1979 fantasy novel), both of which he will executive produce.
Mid 8 figures? What exactly does that mean? I am thinking $33 to $67 Million Dollars.
I am very surprised a SF author could make this kind of money–although I suppose most of it is for the producing, not the writing.
GRRM probably makes more money than every other living SF-Fantasy author, aside from Stephen King, put together. So yes, this is a very unusual amount of money.
HBO seems to have irrational choices here. You have to wonder how it can plan a Dunk and Egg series, based on the fact that the hasn’t written the other 9 of them, with them being a size of being able to be knocked out in a week, a month max.
And five years? I’d not expect a whole lot of sensible and good stuff out of him in five years if he survives that long. He was arguably burnt out fifteen years ago.
I just really, REALLY, REALLY hope that Martin is given - or is willing to give himself - as much control over the writing as possible.
I was appalled to see Game of Thrones - which, initially, I adored - suffer a steep decline in quality the more it deviated from Martin’s writing, to the point of sliding down into B-list or even C-list level plots seemingly propped up only by the A-list actors - actors whose credentials were built on the EARLIER seasons which were more solidly connected to Martin’s literary material. By the end of the show, I was truly disgusted with how far it had fallen - going from a totally gripping, immersive drama in the first few seasons, with peerless world-building and a pervasive sense of “anything could happen at any time and no barrier is safe from being broken” to a complete mess of a show that first struggled through tying together 30 meandering sub-stories simultaneously while ignoring the more compelling characters, as the writers desperately tried to figure out where to take the main story, and then ultimately into a really mindless “ok, time to wrap this all up with a bang!” final season.
It was VERY clear when the original Martin stories started to be subsumed by the flailings of the HBO show writers, and very disappointing as well.
