A ‘Game Of Thrones’ Movie Could Be On The Way, And Here’s What It Could Be About

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, it’s probable that you can’t get enough of the hit HBO series, and you’re just dying waiting for the fifth season to kick off next year. Now comes word from one of the series’ stars that even more Thrones might be on the way: it appears that the show’s creators have discussed a Game of Thrones movie. But just what could such a film cover?

The news came by way of a Daily Beast interview with Game of Thrones‘ Charles Dance, the British actor who portrays Lannister patriarch Tywin Lannister. Dance detailed how exactly he will be popping up in Season 5 even though he was totally [spoilered] by [spoiler] in the last episode of Season 4. The juicy part, though, came when Dance started talking about what Game of Thrones‘ producers have been talking about behind the scenes.

“There’s talk of eventually trying to do a feature film,” Dance said, “but I don’t know which of the storylines. There’s so much to cram into a film.”

The feature film treatment is nothing new for HBO series. Sex and the City, another hit HBO series, got two feature films made – one in 2008 and a sequel in 2010 – after its 94-episode run ended in 2004. There was also talk of the (criminally under-appreciated) Deadwood getting a final sendoff on the big screen, though that never materialized.

Game of Thrones, though, would be a bit different. The show is a hit on a level HBO has never seen, spawning video games, mixtapes, and other spinoffs on its own. That’s in addition to Game of Thrones itself being spawned from George RR Martin’s hit series of fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire.

That latter fact is what makes the possibility of a Game of Thrones movie particularly odd. Since the series has hewed relatively closely to Martin’s source material, just where could the makers of the show look to in order to bring the world of Westeros to the big screen without spoiling the material they’re currently bringing to the small screen?

If you’ve paid attention to the Game of Thrones books, comics, video games, or anything else, you already know there’s no shortage of extra materials to draw on for a movie. Over the nearly two decades since the publication of the first Ice and Fire installment, Martin has sculpted a fantasy world that’s probably deep enough to merit its own Marvel-like universe of productions.

First up, there’s the Tales of Dunk and Egg, a series of novellas Martin published between 1998 and 2010 and says he plans to continue. The tales follow the adventures of Ser Duncan “Dunk” the Tall and future king Aegon “Egg” V Targaryen. They’re set some 90 years before the events of A Game of Thrones, so a movie version would serve as a prequel of sorts to hit series.

These could work beautifully as movies, given that they are novellas focusing on just two characters. Viewers would still be able to see the richly detailed world of Westeros, and the smaller cast rolls would work well for a two-hour affair. The interplay with a lowly hedge knight mentoring a future king would also, no doubt, make for some terrific scenes.

A story set 90 years previous to Game of Thrones would, of course, mean that viewers couldn’t get a fix of their favorite characters: no Tyrion, no Danaerys, no Arya, Hodor Hodor. Still, if the producers trusted Martin’s writing and cast the leads well, audiences could come to love Dunk and Egg as much as any other Game of Thrones regulars.

If they didn’t go with Dunk and Egg, there’s another prequel that could prove equally interesting. That one doesn’t have a name proper, but we’ll call it Telling Us What the H*** Happened to Valyria.

This one doesn’t have nearly as much as a following, but inquiring minds have been curious about just what happened to the lost kingdom of Valyria. That’s the original home of Danaerys Targaryen’s ancestors, the place from which they brought their dragons.

In the books, Valyria has been abandoned and desolate for centuries, and the area is now said to be demon-haunted, with sailors saying that anyone who even sees the islands will soon die a dreadful death.

What happened? Nobody knows. There are theories about how “the proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day,” but all Martin has written describes a vague, catastrophic event.

That could certainly make for fodder for a movie, no? Well, if not, there’s also the possibility of a film detailing the events of Robert’s Rebellion. That’s the uprising that eventually led to the status quo as we saw it on the first episode of Game of Thrones. Robert Baratheon, Ned Stark, and the Lannisters threw down the last Targaryen king and established a new order for the Seven Kingdoms. Wouldn’t it be great to see old Ned Stark alive again? Maybe root for him to not do the honorable thing every time?

There really is a wealth of possibilities were Game of Thrones‘ producers really to bring some other aspect of the show to the big screen. A movie could even serve as a capstone to the show once it finishes its run on HBO, though who knows when that will be.

But really, this movie had better happen, and it had better tell us what happened to Valyria.