‘Game of Thrones’: HBO’s Jon Snow Spinoff Show Is Canceled

Jon Snow has been banished all over again. On Tuesday, Kit Harington confirmed that his Game of Thrones spinoff about Jon’s life beyond The Wall is no longer in development. In an interview with Screen Rant, he said that the project could be picked back up some day, but for now, it has been “shelved.”

There have been nearly a dozen Game of Thrones spinoffs considered by HBO over the last few years, but Harington’s project was the only proposed sequel. Back in 2022, fans learned that Harington had helped develop a pitch for a show about his character, assembling a team of writers and producers to pitch the idea to HBO with him. Author George R.R. Martin later wrote about the project on his blog, revealing that the working title was SNOW. However, this week, Harington told Screen Rant that winter is not coming.

“I hadn’t really ever spoken about it, because it was in development,” Harington explained. “I didn’t want it leaked out that it was being developed, and I didn’t want the thing to happen where people kind of start theorizing, getting either excited about it or hating the idea of it, when it may never happen. Because in development, you look at every angle, and you see whether it’s worth it. And currently, it’s not. Currently, it’s off the table, because we all couldn’t find the right story to tell that we were all excited about enough. So, we decided to lay down tools with it for the time being. There may be a time in the future where we return to it, but at the moment, no. It’s firmly on the shelf.”

This answers a major question hanging over the fandom since December of 2022. At the time, Martin wrote on his blog that some of the Game of Thrones spinoffs in development had been “shelved.” He did not reveal which ones, but at the time, we knew of at least seven projects that were reportedly in development, including SNOW. Now we know that SNOW was shelved, and we’ve gotten a few other updates since then, as well. Martin later revealed that the prequel Ten Thousand Ships was shelved, while The Sea Snake was changed from a live-action series to an animated one.

Ten Thousand Ships would have been set about 1,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones, and would have been about the Rhoynish exodus from Essos to Westeros. These river-dwellers purported to have magical powers fled the Valyrian dragon lords and sought a new home, eventually landing in Dorne. As for The Sea Snake – or Nine Voyages as it might have been called – it would have been set about a generation before House of the Dragon. It would have been about a young Corlys Velaryon and his travels around this fictional world.

For fans of Martin’s books and all the deep-cut lore within, those two shows would have been exciting, but SNOW would have appealed to more casual fans in particular. It would have been about Jon’s life after the events of Game of Thrones, and fans hoped it would cast the ending of the main series in a better light.

Fans of any kind have a lot to look forward to even without SNOW or Ten Thousand Ships. House of the Dragon Season 2 premieres on Sunday, June 16 on HBO and Max. Another prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, is filming now and is expected to premiere in 2025. Martin has reported great progress on his next novel, The Winds of Winter, so the book series may be finished soon as well. In the meantime, Martin’s books are available in print, digital, and audiobook formats.