Although the end of game of Thrones in 2019 directly coincided with the news that HBO was in development on a number of spin-off series led by source material writer George RR Martin, 2024 feels like just the start of a GoT onslaught. House of the Dragonthe only series still in front of cameras (aside from a completely different pilot that was shot and scrapped) will return for its second season this summer. A knight from seven kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, an adaptation of Martin’s Dunk and Egg story, has been greenlit with the ambitious goal of arriving before the end of the year. Is a Jon Snow series perhaps still in the works? Easy to believe, but there are no officially announced plans.
But Martin, a writer who loves drawing epic conclusions, continues to pique fans’ interest with updates on everything else that may or may not be happening in HBO Max-driven Westeros universe. And the latest update concerns a show that appears to be running with a delay: Nine trips
In a post on his personal pageMartin remarks Nine trips was planned in the order of magnitude game of Thrones And House of the Dragonbut as development continued with showrunner Bruno Heller (Rome, Gotham), it was clear that the vision was prohibitively expensive. “The need to create a different port every week,” writes Martin, “from Driftmark to Lys and the Basilisk Isles to Volantis and Qarth and… well, so on and so forth. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a much better chance of showing everything with animation. So we have three animated projects underway now.”
The animated version of Nine trips joins two other unnamed Game of Thrones animated projects in development. Martin notes that none of them currently have the green light from HBO/Max, but adds, “We’re close to taking the next step with some of them.” It’s unclear if they’re all destined for Max premieres are; Later this year, Warner Bros. Pictures will release a fully animated Lord of the Rings film. The War of the Rohirrim
The switch to animation instead of live-action hasn’t shaken Martin’s enthusiasm for the story, and if anything, it makes him more excited about the potential to adapt more of his A Song of Fire and Ice stories. And that’s because George RR Martin rightly despises Netflix Blue-eyed samurai. Polygon’s second biggest show of 2023, Blue-eyed samurai refined classic samurai tropes with modern action choreography and dimensional drama. We ate it up and so did Martin.
“I hardly know where to start,” 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 amazing action sequences and a cast of well-developed characters, colorful, complex and real. Flawed heroes, villains who are more than cartoons (even if they are, after all, cartoons being drawn). It reminded me of some books I had read. So what was the title of this series? Something about a song…”
Blue-eyed samurai shares a remarkable connection game of Thrones: Jane Wu, who oversaw the animated series and choreographed much of its 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 animation before visualization, inspired her to reverse engineer her process Blue-eyed samuraiin which she attempted to direct live-action and then adapt it into animation with French studio Blue Spirit.
“I implemented this idea [our main] character,” Wu told Polygon last November. “She is biracial. That’s why I wanted this production to feel like a great mix of animation and live action when I watch it. I wanted to show that there is strength in this diversity.”
In Martin’s eyes, the benchmark for Nine trips and the other Thrones animation project was canceled.
“But when it happens, with one, two or all three shows, I hope we can make them as great and as gripping as possible Blue-eyed samurai,” he writes. “We will definitely try.”
