Not only do Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss have no interest in returning to Westeros in a creative capacity again – they haven’t even watched the show’s first spinoff yet.
The two showrunners got candid about Game of Thrones, the backlash to the final season, and their relationship with it now in a new cover story for THR, in which they talked about their upcoming Netflix series with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem. In it, they revealed that they haven’t watched House of the Dragon and, while Weiss recently rewatched Thrones with his family, Benioff hasn’t revisited a single episode since the finale.
In the aftermath of Thrones, they said they were pitched a number of other shows, including fantasy ones, but weren’t interested.
“It was really important to move on and put Westeros behind us,” Benioff said.
But in perhaps even more surprising news, the duo revealed that they essentially turned down a lifetime of free money. Basically, as THR explains, because of their work on Game of Thrones, they were “contractually guaranteed producer credits on all future Thrones spinoffs,” including House of the Dragon – whether they did literally anything on those spinoffs or not. And they said no to it.
Benioff says HBO was “kind of confused” when they turned down that massive chunk of change: “I remember their lawyer saying, ‘But it’s just money, we’re just going to pay you.’ ”
“I don’t think there is such a thing as free money,” explained Weiss. “For us, if our name is on it, especially that, while being completely detached and uninvolved, it felt like the strain that would come with that hands-off approach — with its success or failure or anything in between — was not worth it.”
A Divisive Legacy
It’s not too hard to see why Benioff and Weiss would want to wash their hands of Westeros. After Game of Thrones became one of HBO’s biggest hits ever (and one of the biggest TV shows of all time period), the finale and entire final season failed to live up to many fans’ expectations.
As Laura Prudom put it in her 6/10 review for IGN, “yes, Season 8 felt underwhelming. But the one thing Game of Thrones has going for it is that even at its worst, it’s generally more ambitious, engaging, and impressive than the majority of other TV shows.”
Weiss revealed they went “cold turkey” on reading online feedback, and the last time he googled himself was in 2013. “The ambient stress level in our lives dropped by about 50 percent overnight,” he said.
“You always hope everyone’s going to love anything you do and it would’ve been great if 100 percent of people loved it, but they didn’t,” Benioff said of Season 8. “You can get so bogged down in public opinion that you spend your whole life googling things and trying to find people who felt one way or the other way.”
Elsewhere in the THR profile, Benioff and Weiss also talked about their scrapped Star Wars movie, which you can read more about here. 3 Body Problem will debut on Netflix on March 21, 2024.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
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