Following on from the success of Game of Thrones it was inevitable that HBO would look to expand the franchise.
But before hitting on the idea of House of the Dragon, they spent a massive $30 million on a pilot for a show that never made our screens.
‘Bloodmoon’ (to use its production name) was also a planned prequel series. But after recording and editing the pilot, HBO ditched it completely and moved on to HotD.
David Benioff and DB Weiss, showrunners for GoT, were set for roles as producers for Bloodmoon, while the series was to be written by A Song of Ice and Fire author George RR Martin along with Jane Goldman who has writing credits on The Limehouse Golem and Rebecca.
In fact, Bloodmoon was Goldman’s pitch – and there were a total of five spin-offs said to have also been in some level of production at the same time.
Martin, though, wasn’t a fan of the working title for the series and put forward his preferred suggestion as ‘The Long Night’.
The show would have been set around 10,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones and would almost certainly have been the earliest prequel to have been produced.
Had it been made it was to focus on a period of Westeros’ history known as the Long Night. This was a time when winter descended for a generation and the Others came into the world.
The story would have played out long before the Iron Throne was even thought of and detailed the origins of the White Walkers as well as the “mysteries of the East (and) the Starks of legend” who descended from the First Men.
At the time, Westeros was carved up into many tiny kingdoms and some families, such as the Lannisters, were not yet in existence.
Goldman’s pitch was the one of the five to proceed to a full pilot episode. But HBO were aware even at such an early stage that any GoT spin-off needed to reach the standard set by the original show.
Speaking in 2017, Casey Bloys (then Senior Vice President of HBO) thought they would be “very lucky” if just one of the ideas “rises to the level that we have set”.
In the end, HBO decided not to go ahead with the show after the pilot was poorly received by executives. Presumably, they could see no way of making it as gritty and engaging as Game of Thrones and decided to cut their losses for the princely sum of $30 million.
And it appears that we will never get to see Bloodmoon – or indeed, the original pilot of GoT which was, by all accounts, severely lacking in quality when compared to the show that was eventually aired.
And that’s because both are securely locked away to ensure they can never be leaked.