Aegon's Conquest is Game of Thrones' 12th spin-off. Two have aired

Count every Game of Thrones project HBO or Warner Bros has commissioned, announced or confirmed since May 2017 and you arrive at twelve. Two of them have reached an audience. On Monday the twelfth got a release date.

Game of Thrones: Aegon's Conquest opens on 1 June 2029, Deadline reported, with Owen Harris directing from a script by Beau Willimon. It is the first theatrical film in the franchise's history, and it lands 3,666 days after the series finale went out on 19 May 2019. Ten years and thirteen days.

Harris directed three episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, including the Trial of Seven, according to TheWrap. Willimon created House of Cards, wrote The Ides of March and worked on the first season of Andor. No cast has been announced. Sources disagree slightly on the day: The Playlist has 6 June, while Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and TheWrap all have 1 June, which is a Friday and the likelier of the two.

The five scripts nobody ever saw

In May 2017, two months before the seventh season began, HBO ordered pitch scripts for four successor shows, from Jane Goldman, Max Borenstein, Brian Helgeland and Carly Wray. A fifth surfaced that September, when George R.R. Martin confirmed on his own blog that Bryan Cogman was writing one as well. Martin set the expectations himself, in the same post.

"We could possibly see two or even three make it to the pilot stage, with one series emerging on air in 2019 or 2020… and the others maybe later. Truth is, no one knows. Least of all me."

None of the five became a series.

Goldman's turned into Bloodmoon, set during the Age of Heroes, with Naomi Watts leading a cast and S.J. Clarkson directing. HBO shot the entire pilot and then buried it in October 2019. The bill has been reported at between $30m and $35m depending on the outlet; SlashFilm puts it at $30m. Robert Greenblatt, then chairman of WarnerMedia, said afterwards that the pilot "didn't have that depth and richness that the original series' pilot did".

Helgeland's pitch became 10,000 Ships, about Nymeria of the Rhoyne, which was later handed to the Pulitzer-winning playwright Eboni Booth for a rewrite and still has not been made. The scripts by Borenstein, Wray and Cogman never left the page.

The show that did arrive came from outside that group entirely. Ryan Condal had pitched HBO separately in 2016 and been turned down, and House of the Dragon was greenlit in October 2019, the same month Bloodmoon was killed, going to air on 21 August 2022. Martin's guess of 2019 or 2020 was two years light, and in hindsight he was the optimist in the building.

Twelve projects, two on screen

The full list, with what happened to each:

• Jane Goldman's untitled pitch (2017), which became Bloodmoon. Pilot filmed, cancelled October 2019.
• Max Borenstein's untitled pitch (2017). Never produced.
• Brian Helgeland's untitled pitch (2017), which became 10,000 Ships. In development, unmade.
• Carly Wray's untitled pitch (2017). Never produced.
• Bryan Cogman's untitled pitch (2017). Shelved.
• House of the Dragon, greenlit October 2019. Three seasons aired, a fourth and final one due in 2028.
• Flea Bottom, in development from around 2019. Dead by mid-2021.
• Nine Voyages, the Corlys Velaryon prequel, moved from live action to animation. Unmade.
• Snow, the Jon Snow sequel Kit Harington pitched. Revealed in 2022, shelved in 2024.
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, ordered April 2023. Premiered 18 January 2026.
• The Golden Empire, an animated series set in Yi Ti. In development.
• Aegon's Conquest, reported February 2024. Now a film, dated 1 June 2029.

That count is conservative. It leaves out Robert's Rebellion, which Martin has talked about for years without it ever being formally set up, and it treats the 2017 pitches and the named projects they turned into as one item each rather than two. Den of Geek has tracked the same slate and reaches a similar tally.

Two out of twelve is not a scandal. Development is meant to kill things, and a studio that greenlights everything it commissions is a studio with no editorial judgement. It is worth saying plainly what the ratio means, though: for nine years, the most valuable fantasy property on television has been a very expensive way of generating scripts that nobody films.

A series became a film, and the writer changed

Aegon's Conquest was first reported in February 2024, by The Hollywood Reporter, as a television series with Mattson Tomlin writing. Warner Bros confirmed at CinemaCon in Las Vegas in April 2026 that it had become a film, and that Willimon had the script, Variety reported.

So the medium changed and the writer changed, and the gap between the first report of the project and the date now printed on it runs to more than five years. HBO made all 73 episodes of the original series in eight years and one month.

Warner Bros has not explained the switch. The obvious answer is scale. Aegon I Targaryen conquered six kingdoms with three dragons, and Balerion, Vhagar and Meraxes at full size are a visual-effects problem that a premium cable budget covers for a scene and a film budget covers for an act. Television made the dragons of House of the Dragon work by rationing them. A conquest cannot be rationed.

The company setting the date may not be the one that keeps it

There is a wrinkle in putting a tentpole on the calendar for the summer of 2029. Warner Bros. Discovery is in the middle of being bought by Paramount Skydance, whose own filing with the SEC on 25 September describes the closing timing of that acquisition as "not yet certain", and whose 470 million shareholder warrants pay out only if the deal completes. A date three years out is a promise made by executives who cannot be certain they will be in the building to keep it.

That is not an argument against the film. Lucasfilm dated and undated Star Wars projects for a decade before handing Jon Watts the trilogy it had previously insisted was not Episode X, and the franchise is still standing. It is an argument for reading 1 June 2029 as a statement of intent rather than a commitment, which is how the exhibition business reads most dates set this far ahead anyway.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms returns for a second season, based on The Sworn Sword, in 2027. House of the Dragon ends with its fourth season in 2028. On the schedule as it stands today, 1 June 2029 would be the first time in eighteen years that the only new Westeros anywhere is in a cinema.