Peacock Scraps ‘Game of Thrones’ Author’s New Show

Even author George R.R. Martin deals with some rejections in the entertainment industry. On Sunday, the Game of Thrones scribe made a blog post about the WGA writers strike, voicing his support for the screenwriters while also giving updates on all of his ongoing projects. He revealed for the first time that Peacock has passed on the TV adaptation of his long-running collaborative series Wild Cards.

“Peacock has passed on WILD CARDS, alas,” Martin wrote. “A pity. We will try to place it elsewhere, but not until the strike is over.” For those unfamiliar, Wild Cards is a series of “mosaic novels” co-written by Martin and a group of fellow authors depicting a world where superheroes emerged in the U.S. after World War II. It is possibly Martin’s best-known ongoing project outside of A Song of Ice and Fire, and it has been in development for TV since 2016. Sadly, this was the first confirmation that the project will not be moving forward.

Universal Cable Productions acquired the right to create Wild Cards TV series in August of 2016, but because of Martin’s exclusive overall deal with HBO, he would not be allowed to work on the show. Instead, author and co-creator Melinda M. Snodgrass was tapped to be an executive producer.

The next update came in 2018 when Universal announced that the adaptation would air on Hulu. According to a report by Deadline, at the time the plan was to create two TV series based on the books. In 2021 the outlet reported that the project had moved from Hulu to Peacock, which was the last we had heard of it until Sunday’s sad revelation.

Wild Cards is extremely unique among sci-fi and fantasy writing projects. It is a superhero series with a shared universe, but it has had 44 authors contribute to it at the time of this writing. Each author created their own character and write stories about them with connections to the rest of the works to be placed within each “novel.” There have been 30 Wildcard books so far, as well as comic book adaptations.

The inciting incident that unifies all these books is the onset of the “Wild Card virus” in the year 1946. The virus was a biological weapon designed by extra-terrestrials to rewrite human DNA, but its effects are unpredictable. It kills 90 percent of the people infected and disfigures another 9 percent of them in unique ways. The remaining 1 percent are mutated into “Aces” – people with superpowers and special abilities. Martin’s character in the series is called The Turtle – a telekinetic teenager from New Jersey who fights crime with his mental powers while his body remains inside a protective “shell” made out of old car parts.

Sadly, this cancellation does not even take anything off of Martin’s plate since the author was not working on the show in the first place. He promised once again this weekend that work on his long-awaited novel, The Winds of Winter is progressing. Beyond that, fans can look forward to House of the Dragon Season 2 in the summer or fall of 2024.