6 Years Ago Today, HBO Cancelled an Exciting Fantasy Series After Spending $30 Million on the Pilot Episode

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HBO is famous for producing incredible TV shows, but it’s also cancelled a lot of series over the years. This is especially true for science fiction and fantasy shows. While Game of Thrones was a huge hit, others like Westworld, Raised by Wolves, Lovecraft Country, and Carnivále didn’t last as long as they could have – or perhaps should have. Still, they at least got the chance to air.

HBO has been working to replicate the success of Game of Thrones, leading to shows like House of the Dragon. However, they also invested heavily in a pilot for a prequel called Bloodmoon that ultimately didn’t move forward. Bloodmoon would have been set thousands of years before Game of Thrones, during Westeros’s Age of Heroes, and aimed to explain the origins of the White Walkers – mysteries the original series left unanswered.

As a huge fan of the original Game of Thrones, I was really excited about the prequel. Beyond the promise of seeing the White Walkers’ origins and diving into the history of families like the Starks, it just felt like it had a lot going for it. The fact that George R.R. Martin co-created it with Jane Goodman was a big plus – she’s proven she can handle these kinds of franchises with films like X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Kick-Ass, and Kingsman. Plus, the cast was incredible! Naomi Watts leads a really strong group of actors including Miranda Richardson, Denise Gough, Naomi Ackie, and Jamie Campbell Bower. And let’s not forget, HBO clearly believed in it, reportedly dropping $30-35 million just on the pilot episode!

Why Did HBO Cancel Bloodmoon & Was It The Right Call?

Considering how much money was spent on the pilot and HBO’s ambition to build a full Game of Thrones franchise, it’s easy to assume the Bloodmoon pilot was a complete failure, leading to its cancellation. But that wasn’t quite right. In 2020, Casey Bloys, who was HBO’s programming president at the time (and is now its CEO), explained that there wasn’t one single reason why the show didn’t move forward.

I thought Jane’s work was excellent, especially considering how difficult the project was. There wasn’t any single part that didn’t work well, but overall, it just didn’t quite come together as expected. That’s why, from the beginning, we explored several different projects beyond just continuing ‘Game of Thrones’. We knew it would be great if even one pilot was successful, but developing a show is always challenging and requires many attempts, and this project was no exception.

Robert Greenblatt, who led WarnerMedia when the Bloodmoon series was cancelled, later shared a similar view in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He explained that while the show was well-made and visually impressive, it didn’t capture the same emotional impact or complexity as the original Game of Thrones pilot.

However, other sources painted a less positive picture. Shortly after the show was cancelled, TVLine reported that the production had faced difficulties for some time. According to the report, HBO executives reviewed an early version of the pilot, asked for significant changes, and were still unsatisfied. The report also mentioned possible disagreements among creators and problems with the budget, though HBO hasn’t officially confirmed these issues.

One of the biggest challenges for HBO with its Game of Thrones prequels was the limited existing source material. The backstory covering the Age of Heroes and the Long Night is quite brief – only a few pages long. Unlike the original series, there wasn’t a novel to directly adapt, meaning fewer developed characters and events. This wasn’t necessarily a flaw, but it definitely made things harder for the network. This is clear when looking at the prequels HBO has greenlit: the cancellation of Bloodmoon coincided with the announcement of House of the Dragon, which is based on George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood. The next planned spinoff will also be a direct adaptation, using Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas.

The cancelled Bloodmoon pilot is an interesting thought experiment – a look at what could have been. It’s also a strange situation because the first Game of Thrones pilot was famously bad and needed to be almost entirely re-filmed, yet HBO couldn’t salvage Bloodmoon. While some images leaked online and looked promising, we’ll unfortunately never see the finished show. HBO’s decision to cut their losses probably means it was the right move, or at least a risky one. I still hope the show’s ideas might be revisited somehow, but with the new spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, looking so good, the Game of Thrones franchise seems secure.

Game of Thrones is available to stream on HBO Max.

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2025-10-29 17:43