House of the Dragon to breathe fire on fans again after getting a Season 3 renewal at HBO

HBO‘s sophomore season of House of the Dragon doesn’t premiere until Sunday, but the network is ready to announce Season 3 today! This announcement is an amoosbouche for the carnage, incest, and backstabbing to come when Season 2 launches this weekend. Word about HBO greenlighting House of the Dragon Season 3 is hardly a surprise, considering the show’s overwhelming success. In addition to attracting new fans to the epic familial drama series, many who wrote off Game of Thrones after an underwhelming final season have caved to the FOMO and embraced the star-studded spinoff.

House of the Dragon is based on George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, and focuses on the House Targaryen.

After a significant death in House of the Dragon Season 1, Rhaenyra and Alicent are ready to go to war, trading “blood for blood” and burning oppressors where they stand. The Game of Thrones spinoff is set hundreds of years before the original series. It is based upon George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, a Targaryen history book that chronicles the history of House Targaryen, starting with “Aegon the Conqueror, creator of the Iron Throne, and [going on] to recount the generations of Targaryens who fought to hold the throne, all the way up to the civil war, known as the Dance of the Dragons, that nearly tore their dynasty apart.”

Matt Smith, Eve Best, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Sonoya Mizuno, Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall, Matthew Needham. Abubakar Salim, Gayle Rankin, Freddie Fox, and Simon Russell Beale join Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke as primary cast members.

While House of the Dragon Season 3 was inevitable, it’s nice to have an official announcement about the show’s continuation. In addition to more House of the Dragon, HBO is working on another GOT spinoff series, Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight. HBO has now cast the lead roles for The Hedge Knight, with Peter Claffey (Vikings: Valhalla) and Dexter Sol Ansell (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) set to star in the series as Dunk and Egg.

The official logline for The Hedge Knight: “A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros … a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall (Claffey), and his diminutive squire, Egg (Ansell). Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.”

The Hedge Knight is written and executive produced by George R.R. Martin and Ira Parker, with Ryan Condal, Vince Gerardis, Owen Harris, and Sarah Bradshaw also executive producing. The series is based on three novellas published by Martin — The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2003), and The Mystery Knight (2010). All three stories were then collected and published together as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in 2015. The stories have typically been seen as “lighter” tales in the realm of Westeros, but we’ll see if the series follows suit.