The return to the world of Game of Thrones at last has a premiere date.
House of the Dragon comes to HBO on Aug. 21. The network announced the date of the long-awaited prequel series Wednesday morning, along with a teaser poster.
The Aug. 21 date means House of the Dragon will debut 12 days before Amazon unveils its big-budget, heavily hyped Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power, on its Prime Video streaming service. The two shows will have new episodes running concurrently — though not directly opposite each other, given the nature of the streaming world — into the fall.
House of the Dragon, which tells the story of House Targaryen and is set roughly 200 years before the events in Game of Thrones, stars Olivia Cooke as Alicent Hightower, Emma D’Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen.
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The series is from showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, and THR previously asked the latter about how the upcoming drama’s look, feel and tone will differ from the original series, which ran from 2011 to 2019 and ranks as HBO’s most popular program in its history and the most Emmy-winning primetime drama of all time.
“I think we were very respectful of what the original show is,” said Sapochnik. “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 complement 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 …'” he added. “If you start every sentence with that, you’ve lost. 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.”
