If we’ve learned anything from the tortuous final episodes of Game of Thrones, it’s that nothing quite unites humanity like collective disappointment. Which begs the question, given the news that Warner Bros is reportedly in the early stages of bringing George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones to the big screen, exactly how much worse could it get than Bran ending up the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms and Daenerys deciding, after years of liberating cities and freeing people, that her true passion was crowd control via dragon fire?
Perhaps this new film, of which we know little thus far, will make us forget all the horrors of that final season. Perhaps it will usher Game of Thrones back into the light from the shadows of Jon Snow being packed off tediously to the frozen north and Jaime and Cersei dying boringly under a load of rocks. Maybe there will be dragon fire, steely eyed armies of the undead and maniacal ambition to make Littlefinger’s attempts at machiavellian ladder-climbing look like a Riverrun poetry club debating the merits of sad fish ballads. Or perhaps it will be about Tyrion’s desperate, increasingly drunken quest to uncover the last hidden bottle of Arbor Gold in Westeros.
We just don’t know, and the only way to work it out is by a process of elimination. It can’t really be a movie-length remake of season eight, much as we would love it to be, because all the cast will now be at least a decade older. The only thing worse than having to sit through all that again would be to have to sit through all that again in the full knowledge that this is what they should have done the first time around, except with even more CGI. It can’t be a film adaptation of Martin’s final two chapters of A Song of Ice and Fire because the beloved fantasy writer still hasn’t got around to finishing them yet. And besides, we were always promised that GOT showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss only royally messed up the ending of the show because they had been told by Martin exactly how he would have royally messed up the ending of the books had he actually got round to writing them in time.
It also can’t be a prequel, because we already have about 6,000 of those hitting TV screens in the next few years, from the current series House of the Dragon (family feud with dragons, petty grudges, and enough brooding stares to dim the sun) to the forthcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (medieval road trips with a broken knight and his pint-sized, secretly royal squire) and the still-mooted offshoots Nine Voyages (Master and Commander but with more dragons, fewer sailing qualifications, and one very determined beardy sailor bloke’s quest to see every corner of Essos), Aegon’s Conquest (Westeros: The Early Years, where the title character and his sister-wives unleash dragon fire on anyone who doesn’t immediately bow) and Ten Thousand Ships (Princess Nymeria’s endless escape across Essos to Dorne, because nothing says “dream destination” like a scorching desert.) There simply isn’t anything left to mine in the GOT pre-history, which leaves either a sequel or a full remake.
Frozen exile … Kit Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. Photograph: Courtesy of HBO
Given the current outrage in Potterdom over the new TV series, just a few years after the movies ended, it would be interesting indeed to see quite how Martin’s fanbase might receive any attempt to completely revisit A Song of Ice and Fire, but this time on the big screen. Would we really have sat through Daenerys’s endless traipsing around Essos if we had known how it was all going to end? Can anyone handle six three-hour films about Bran’s glacially paced descent into weirdo druid-dom? These character arcs were fascinating on TV because it didn’t matter so much that very little was actually happening when the production values were so glorious and there was a distinct possibility that Arya might just kill everyone on her list. The best bits of GOT were not always the most obviously cinematic segues – for every extended battle with the Night King there were at least three or four more brilliantly intimate moments such as Jaime and Brienne’s bath scene or Arya and Tywin Lannister’s bizarrely delicate conversations at Harrenhal.
There is a serious argument that TV’s more languid, open-ended format helped Weiss and Benioff get something out of Martin’s books that would most likely be completely lost in the shift to three-act, big-screen fantasy spectacle and the kind of cinema that might be more concerned with cavalry battles and the many occasions in which stuff got blown up with wildfire than the bit where we discover how Hodor got his name. The TV shows veered off course regularly compared with the books, so much so that there were times that GOT felt like more of a big-budget, splendidly colourful tribute to A Song of Ice and Fire, rather than a direct adaptation.
And yet let’s think for a moment how much further from the source we might find ourselves within the more rigid confines of the movie format – this could be like that bit in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King where Legolas the elf reverse-abseils up a Mûmakil, except with Tyrion sliding down the neck of a dragon, goblet in hand, shouting “I drink and I know things” while a choir belts out the Game of Thrones theme in Latin. Jon Snow might find himself transformed from brooding warrior to Westeros’s premiere action hero, speeding across icy tundras on horseback with Ghost in a saddlebag, pulling mid-air spins while dodging White Walker lasers.
And then of course there’s the prospect of a sequel. Do we really want to see what Bran got up to next, or how the Others were ultimately integrated into polite society, despite struggling with basic conversational skills at dinner parties, and eventually did a great job protecting Westeros from invasion by a rogue faction of militants unsullied? After eight whole seasons were reduced to Bran winning the throne by default while Jon was exiled for caring too much, I’m not quite sure I’ve got the energy.