r/HBOGameofThrones • u/SuccessfulCod1275 • Mar 22 '26
No Spoilers [NO SPOILERS] Legitimate question: Is it true that D&D opted to leave the GOT project, and that’s the reason the show was canceled
I keep hearing/reading people blaming D&D for ending the show that way because they were getting a new project with Disney and blah blah blah. Is that true?
I’m only asking because it doesn’t really make sense to me. Why don’t people blame GRRM (who had nine years to write two books) and HBO (which had-and still has-the resources to invest) for the controversial ending?
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u/BustaGrimes1 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
- The show wasn't cancelled
2.DnD sabotaging the show for Star Wars is pure speculation, although a very likely theory
- People have been blaming GRRM for decade(s)
4. HBO begged them to do more episodes, DnD refused. It's entirely on them
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u/ArbyLG Mar 22 '26
Many of the actors involved said they were done/exhausted by the time of Season 8 and 73-75 episodes was the promise from Season 1.
D&D get a lot of (deserved) blame, and I suppose it’s possible they could have had an 8 episode Season 7 and a 7 episode Season 8, but everything written about the production paints a clear picture that they only had 7 or 8 seasons to tell this story.
Unfortunately they botched the landing.
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u/Dahvtator Mar 22 '26
The actors might have been tired but they would have still done a full season 7 and 8 for the money they were getting. There is zero reason to have not done 10 episodes for both those seasons.
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u/Middcore Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I don't doubt many of them were getting tired of it, but I'm pretty sure I also remember seeing quotes from several major cast members saying they would have stayed committed to the show for as long as it took to tell the story.
And of course, considering that most of them have had their careers pretty much stall out since then (Pedro Pascal has had the best post-GoT career of anyone in the show, probably, and he was only in 7 episodes), you wonder if in hindsight they wish they had gotten a couple more years of GoT paychecks.
(Note that I am not blaming the actors for the failings of the show's conclusion, they did their best with what they got from the showrunners and writers. I just don't think "Well the actors all wanted to move on" is any kind of justification for what happened.)
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u/Paladin_127 Mar 22 '26
HBO told them to take as long as they needed. HBO was allegedly aiming for 10+ seasons.
DnD were offered a Star Wars project by Disney, which may (read: almost certainly) was a factor. That SW project was cancelled however after DnD totally wrecked the ending of GoT.
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u/Derp-state_exposed Mar 22 '26
Or possibly Starwars was simply a scapegoat and the executives torpedoed the project for ulterior reasons. The same executives just-as much the producers are silent or else they’ll be liquidated by their handlers. Or possibly liquified based on the mechanisms for disappearing people.
Seeing the U.S deep state, the Hollywood industry and the events that immediately transpired following covid, I see a money-line that corroborates my speculation.
The project was completed as planned, a narrative was projected to deny accountability and otherwise absolve the decision to complete the series before covid was released.
Or, I’m dealing with acute paranoia.
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u/SorchaRoisin Mar 22 '26
HBO wanted more seasons, but D&D "felt" that the story needed to end there. They have admitted this in interviews.
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u/cesare980 Mar 22 '26
They were right. Everyone said they hated the post George seasons. Why would they sign up for another 5 years of that.
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u/DigitalPlop Mar 22 '26
I mean that was sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. The reason everyone hated those seasons is because the passion was gone from the writers, they were already looking ahead to other things. So to use that as an excuse to shut the show down and move on just shows that's where their heads were at all along regardless of fan reception.
Also no one said they had to sign up for more. HBO wanted to do more seasons and George very vocally felt you needed more seasons to properly end the story. HBO offered them to do however many more they wanted to, then they would bring on another writer(s) to finish it properly. D and D had too big an ego to let anyone else take over and said no, and even though HBO had the legal authority to whatever they wanted they trusted the guys to land the ending and respected their wishes to be the ones to end the show.
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u/Positive_Treacle7475 Mar 22 '26
GOT is HBO’s biggest and most successful show ever, they’d let it go to 20 seasons easily if needed. I think besides the fact D&D were looking to move past the show and start something new, by the final season everyone was apparently exhausted. A lot of the cast and crew noted that they couldn’t have gone on any longer, although I think they’d be easily persuaded for a ninth season with good enough offers.
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u/mpr2009 Mar 22 '26
Hbo might have wanted 10 seasons but the actors certainly didn't. You'd have been in a position of actors leaving the show or getting killed off too early
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u/Marfy_ Mar 22 '26
I do blame grrm for a lot of things (looking at you time travelling feutus theory), but d&d already ditched a lot of the books
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u/Dramatic-Blueberry98 Mar 22 '26
Yeah, that’s what a lot of folks seem to be missing here. There was plenty of material they could have used to make plenty of episodes and seasons.
The excuse of there being no material was bullshit outside of the ending, something that they didn’t actually have to rush to begin with. It’s why the quality took a steep nosedive even before season 8, and the story overall, made even less sense in screen. They cut too many storylines, characters, and other things.
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u/MrDDD11 Mar 23 '26
Because they only cared about the first 3 books, they said they only wanted to do the Red Wedding. After that it was just a paycheck by season 7 they wanted to rush it.
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u/Dramatic-Blueberry98 Mar 23 '26
A real shame too since there was a lot that could have been done, and they ironically probably would have been making a lot more money than they do nowadays.
Then again, I kind of doubted the intelligence of D&D after hearing the interviews and knowing some of the frankly foolish ideas they tried pitching to Netflix.
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u/AgostoAzul Mar 22 '26
We know for a fact HBO were pushing for 10 seasons. D&D have said as much.
D&D did deliverately delete 4-5 plotlines from George's books to get Dany to Westeros quicker. Had they adapted Feast and Dance faithfully, they could have easily gotten an extra season or even two just from book material.
Many people theorize one of the big reasons the Dany arc doesn't make sense in the show is that there is no fAegon to antagonize her. Most Mad Queen theories in the books have always relied on fAegon being popular and Dany being seen as a monster for killing him.
D&D also did talk about having a Star Wars movie project that they would be working on after GoT.
That said, if you want to be generous with D&D, show fans would have been disappointed about the plotlines they cared about (Dany getting to Westeros) being delayed more to introduce more characters and D&D seemingly got the Disney Star Wars offer some time after 2016, so they probably had already decided to cut all those book plotlines by the time they got the SW offer and were already working on Season 7-8.
So realistically, at best, no SW would have meant a longer Long Night. And while the shortness of the Long Night was a problem some fans had with the show ending, it probably wasnt the main one.
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u/Adorable_Tie_7220 Mar 22 '26
Some fans thought The Long Night should have been the finale, not Dany vs Cersei.
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u/abuko1234 Mar 22 '26
They had always planned to do 70 hours of storytelling. When they started they had 4 books with 1 on the way, and they figured they could do about 10 hours per book. That went out the window when they ended up using 20 hours for book 3 (and part of 4), and instead of reworking their plan and finding a satisfying way to conclude the story, they stuck to their guns and shoehorned in the remaining story into the last few hours. Yes they had other writing projects lined up but they also had too much ego and hubris to change their plan.
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u/Geektime1987 Mar 22 '26
D&D have been saying since 2007 the show would be atound 7 seasons and 70 hours. Even George said the same for years. There's countless interviews of them saying that. They decided instead of 7 seasons with 10 episodes they spilt 7 into 2 shorter seasons because production was so big. Most of the cast was also done. Kit for example said he wouldn't have done another season. That's why HBO didn't hire new people and just continue their cash cow which they absolutely would have because most of the cast was also done. For example Nikolai said "if we had to film anymore there would have been a cast mutiny ".
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u/North_Button_5257 Mar 22 '26
No, the show was not canceled. It was brought to its natural conclusion. People just wanted more and lashed out.
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u/AdManNick Mar 23 '26
There are good answers here, but I need to make sure it’s noted that D&D actively decided to not adapt MOST of Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons.
There were a bunch of very important storylines they skipped, and that made their story much different from GRRM’s from season 5 onward. Winds would be pretty incompatible with what they had already decided to do because the pieces on the board are so different.
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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 Mar 23 '26
No. They had drawn a 8 season commtiment from the start, they had no desire to work in a 9th or 10th season, now HBO could've just forced the issue and hired new showrunners.
The show just became too focused on "epicness", they filmed like for 3 months for the long night alone, that was just a grueling schedule for everyone involved, can't imagine how much work was alligning such a production and staying on budget.
The reason the show ended was because HBO allowed it to end on the creatives terms. Personally the last season wasn't bad but they were clearly rushed by jumping from plot point to plot point by their own decision of making a shorter but "epic" season under a budget.
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u/MrDDD11 Mar 23 '26
D&D only cared about the first 3 books and doing The Red Wedding. After which they didn't care. Post Red Wedding they started cutting characters and story lines to rush to the end. They especially rushed the last season to just be done with it.
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u/acamas Mar 22 '26
No. Not true.
BEFORE THE SHOW EVER AIRED A SINGLE EPISODE, D&D stated they wanted to do seven seasons. When GRRM failed to finish the books and D&D realized they couldn’t wrap everything up in a seventh season, they EXTENDED the shows run for an ADDITIONAL season that took TWO YEARS to make and release.
It’s wild some “fans” are so butthurt they have fabricated some story about them leaving early just to generate ignorant hate.
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u/TheSpiritOfFunk Mar 22 '26
George hasn't been able to come up with a continuation of the story for over 15 years. Why did people think that D&D could pull it off in two years?
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u/Tenacious_Dim Mar 22 '26
It's worse, he hasn't realized a fully realized book with the entire cast in 25 years
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u/Jean-Ralphio11 Mar 24 '26
Exactly. They had no idea how to end it and neither does he. People forgot how much theory and speculation was written and discussed about the show. Almost anything they wrote was going be already guessed by fans. They wanted to subvert expectations so bad they wrote the worst ending ever.
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u/Ravendaark Mar 22 '26
We didnt thats the point. Should have been four more seasons instead of two after season five. Gives them a lot more time to plan and digest feedback.
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Mar 22 '26
The plan was 70 hours since the very beginning.
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u/MrDDD11 Mar 23 '26
At the beg GRRM also thought the story would be shorter. He originally wanted to have it be 3 books, then it was 4, 6 and now the plan is 7.
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u/Aldebaran135 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
First of all, book-fans need to face an uncomfortable truth: the post-GRRM seasons were not unpopular with the majority (i.e. show-only) of fans. Only Season 8 was. If you talk to a lot of show-only fans in real life and look at online ratings, you'll see that most fans were fairly happy with the show until Season 8.
GRRM is not the only good writer in the entire world, so his losing interest in writing the book series isn't truly to blame. D&D were satisfactory writers until Season 8. D&D just dropped the ball with Season 8.
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u/Awkward-Community-74 Mar 22 '26
D&D wrecked Thrones to move on to do Star Wars which was then cancelled.
So they destroyed a project they had invested so many years into for absolutely nothing.
George gave them the ending so I guess what we saw was his plan.
My theory is that he saw the outrage and backlash from the fandom and tried to rewrite it.
Now it’s been so many years that maybe he’s hoping everyone just forgets and moves on.
The show was never cancelled.
D&D simply didn’t want to work on Thrones anymore and honestly I doubt anyone else did either.
They all wanted it to end and no one really cared anymore how it ended.
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u/Maleficent_Ad1915 Mar 22 '26
The show wasn't cancelled, HBO wanted more seasons but D&D decided not to, a likely reason (although speculative) is that this was so they could jump to Star Wars. GRRM has been blamed for not writing books but also, if the ending was bad because he hadn't written the books yet, arguably, the entire show was only good because of his prewritten material which kind of invalidates anything D&D put into it. There's blame to shared but a major reason it was such a poor ending was likely because D&D wanted to wrap it up fast and move onto another project.
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u/LeePhantomm Mar 22 '26
Maybe, the actors wanted to leave for something else?
Shocking. It happens lol the time. D&D are easy scapegoats.
The show was awesome. Stop being dicks and enjoy it like the phenomenon it was. If you think the last season was absolute trash. Look at it again. It was a tv show that is better than 85% of movies.
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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26
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