One “Thrones” Spin Off Now Going Animated

“Nine Voyages,” one of the many planned spin offs of the “Game of Thrones” franchise in development at HBO, has undergone a major change. The series is set to follow the “House of the Dragon” character and legendary seaman Lord Corlys Velaryon, also known as The Sea Snake, on a series of voyages.

In a New Year’s Eve posting on his , author George R.R. Martin heaped praise upon Netflix’s “Blue Eye Samurai” and spoke about how several years ago they originally had four ideas for animated shows – two of which have subsequently fallen away. It’s then he revealed that plans for “Nine Voyages” are pivoting from live action to animation instead, a decision he fully supports as he admits costs of doing it in live action would’ve been prohibitively high: “We have moved NINE VOYAGES, our series about the legendary voyages of the Sea Snake, over from live action to animation.

A move I support fully. Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live action version prohibitively expensive, what with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to… well, on and on and on.

There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation. So we now have three animated projects underway.” No word on what the other two animated projects are, but he says work on them “continues apace”. HBO has had success in the field of adult animation based on popular IP, from the 1990s “Spawn” series to the more recent highly acclaimed “Harley Quinn”.

Will any of these ‘Thrones’ spin offs make it to air? Martin says: “No way to know. Nothing is certain in Hollywood.”.