A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has a much smaller budget than House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones emerged as the most acclaimed television series of the twenty-first century, breaking records in viewership, award achievements, and production costs. Its unprecedented success ensured that fans would return to Westeros, resulting in the development of prequel series such as House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Nevertheless, the Dunk & Egg series operates on a significantly smaller budget than its forerunners.

George R.R. Martin hints at A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ budget

The Game of Thrones progenitor went on a European trip, where he also visited the set of  A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. He met the cast and the crew there and shared some BTS images. He also talked about the budget of the show on his blog, Not A Blog:

“Heading up to the shoot, I was as anxious as I was eager. KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is a smaller show than either GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, with a much smaller budget, but I really want it to be great. Ninety per cent of the story is set in a field, surrounded by tents, we would not need the huge sets the other shows had featured, but it couldn’t look fake or cheap either, and the costumes and the heraldry and the fights all had to be splendid, and…”

Credits: Not A Blog

How George R.R. Martin created Dunk & Egg

Comtrary to Martin’s other works, his Dunk & Egg books were completed on time, as he claimed in his blog. He revealed the story behind their creation:

““The Hedge Knight” is a novella of about 30,000 words, much much shorter than the huge novels that make up A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. It was written for LEGENDS, a landmark original anthology edited by Robert Silverberg back in the 90s. Bob invited ten of the leading fantasists of the day to write original never-before-published stories set in their own worlds.

A Westeros story, certainly, that was the concept. It could not be a sequel, not without spoiling the things I had in mind for A CLASH OF KINGS and the later volumes. I could do a sidebar, perhaps. A stand-alone story featuring one of my supporting players, maybe. Robert Baratheon before he was king, say. Barristan Selmy might do, or one of his brothers of the Kingsguard… maybe the Sword of the Morning. I could write about Robert’s Rebellion or the Ninepenny Kings, or maybe set something in Oldtown at the Citadel. I mulled all the possibilities. but in the end I decided to go back even further, to a period of Westeros history I had not yet explored at all… virgin territory. And the setting would be…

… a tournament.

I’d featured a tournament in A GAME OF THRONES, to be sure, but that was a sideshow of sorts. I wanted to make the tourney the center of my novella. I did not think any of the other writers in LEGENDS would be doing that.

That was how Dunk & Egg were born.”

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10/18/2024 01:37 am GMT