House of the Dragon will have a different tone from Game of Thrones

The first teaser trailer for Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon was released earlier this month, but you shouldn’t be expecting a cut and paste copy of the original series. Miguel Sapochnik, who helmed many episodes of Game of Thrones, told THR that House of the Dragon will have its own tone when compared to Game of Thrones.

I think we were very respectful of what the original show is. It wasn’t broken so we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. House of the Dragon has its own tone that will evolve and emerge over the course of the show. But first, it’s very important to pay respects and homage to the original series, which was pretty groundbreaking. We’re standing on the shoulders of that show and we’re only here because of that show. So the most important thing for us to do is to respect that show as much as possible and try and compliment it rather than reinvent it. And I was involved in making the original show, so I feel like that’s been useful. Like, I’m not arriving going, “Let’s change everything! Let’s do a different color palette!” No, I quite like the color palette.

“That said, we can’t say, “Well, when we did Thrones, we did it this way…” If you start every sentence with that, you’ve lost,” Miguel Sapochnik said. “This is something else, and should be something else. It’s a different crew, different people, different tone. Hopefully it will be seen as something else. But it will have to earn that — it won’t happen overnight. Hopefully fans will enjoy it for the thing that it is. We’ll be lucky if we ever come close to what the original show was, so we’re just putting our heads down and getting on with it and hoping what we come up with is worthy of having a Game of Thrones title.“

Miguel Sapochnik directed fan-favourite episodes of Game of Thrones such as Hardhome, Battle of the Bastards, and The Winds of Winter. In addition to returning to direct the first episode of House of the Dragon, Sapochnik also serves as an executive producer and co-showrunner alongside Ryan J. Condal. House of the Dragon will debut on HBO next year.