David Benioff wrote a novel that became a great Spike Lee movie (25th Hour, whose script he also penned), a Brad Pitt epic (Troy), and big comic book movie (X-Men Origins: Wolverine). But he remains best known for co-creating a little television program entitled Game of Thrones. Benioff and D.B. Weiss hit paydirt with their HBO take on George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, earning adulation and acrimony in unequal measure. But though the small screen wing of the franchise will live on in spinoffs, it’ll do so without its two creators.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Weiss explains that he and Benioff are done with Westeros. “All in, we were 11 years, probably, doing that show. When I say 11 years, it was full on, all in, all day, every day for 11 years,” he said:
“It was the best decade of our lives. It still kind of feels a bit like a dream, but we got to a place where it was pretty clear to us that we had reached the end of what made sense for us to be involved with in that world that we lived. It just felt like, for us, it was time to move on and get excited and terrified about building something else — building lots of something elses.”
Weiss added, “We never saw more Game of Thrones shows [as] something that made sense for us to be involved with, given where we were just as people at the time we were done with the original.”
Since the original series ended in 2019, HBO has announced multiple Thrones spinoffs. Some of it never made it that far. Last year they revealed they were hard at work on three separate new GoT series, including the Targaryen family history prequel House of Dragons. Meanwhile, Benioff and Weiss are already happily at work on an ambitious, non-George R.R. Martin-related program.
(Via EW)