A new season of House of the Dragon is not quite as big an event as a new season of Game of Thrones used to be, but it’s still a huge series for HBO, and now we have some new info on the release date for season 3.
The news is that House of the Dragon has ended filming for season 3, and now it will enter post-production. Previously, HBO’s Casey Bloys said that House of the Dragon would skate just outside the current Emmy window, ending May 31, 2026, so June is the likely date. Does that line up with this new information? Well, we can check:
- Season 1 – Filming ended in February 2022, the show premiered in August 2022
- Season 2 – Filming ended in September 2023, the show premiered in August 2024.
So, that’s a six-month gap for season 1 and then an 8.5-month gap for season 2. If we’re sticking with six months of post-production, that would actually be before summer started, somewhere in April. But eight months would extend it to, you guessed it, June 2026, so this latest news reinforces, if not almost confirms, the idea that the show will premiere that month. That would make for a 22-month gap between seasons, slightly less than the two years between seasons 1 and 2. Unfortunately, that is somewhat standard these days for a blockbuster production like this.
We know a few other things about what’s happening in season 3 of House of the Dragon and thereafter:
- Season 3 will have eight episodes, the same as season 2 but less than the 10 of season 1.
- It will begin with the Battle of the Gullet, which some in production have said was really supposed to be the finale of season 2, hence why that ended somewhat anticlimactically. There are supposed to be four major events from Fire and Blood in this season, including that one.
- Season 4 has been greenlit already, but it will be the final one of the series. Not really cancelled, just ending the source material. George RR Martin has repeatedly, publicly taken issue with changes they made to his story.
What George RR Martin is happy about is the show that will air before season 3 of House of the Dragon. That would be A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, an adaptation of his Dunk and Egg stories. It will be released on January 18, 2026, six-ish months before House of the Dragon. That is not meant to be a limited series, so it will likely air a season 2 in the gap between House of the Dragon seasons 3 and 4, and could continue on after that. There are several other Game of Thrones-based shows in the works, though it can be hard to keep track of what’s been scrapped and what’s still moving forward on any given day. For now, we have two.
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