This Is Why HBO Still Isn’t Into a Game of Thrones Movie, But George R.R. Martin Is on Board

If you were hoping for a Game of Thrones movie, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s not happening. The good news is that you watch a show whose creators care more about the integrity of their story than price gouging you at the movie theater or dragging the show kicking and screaming into more seasons than it needs.

On that price gouging, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo told Entertainment Weekly,

Certainly there have been conversations where it’s been said, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do that?” But when you start a series with our subscribers, the promise is that for your HBO fee that we’re going to take you to the end of this. I feel that on some level [a movie would be] changing the rules: Now you have to pay $16 to see how your show ends.

But as we’ve all known all along, TV executives are horrified at the idea of ending a show when fans could easily be strung along until every last penny has been squeezed out of the franchise. Literally horrified:

This is the hard part of what we do. We started this journey with David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss, the showrunners, who’ve said GoT will run for seven seasons]. It’s their vision. Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely.

We’ll have an honest conversation that explores all possible avenues. If they weren’t comfortable going beyond seven seasons, I trust them implicitly and trust that’s the right decision—as horrifying as that is to me. What I’m not going to do is have a show continue past where the creators believe where they feel they’ve finished with the story.

So we’ll have to wait and see if that seven-season goal holds up, but so far it looks like that decision will be dictated by the story and goals of the showrunners. Meanwhile, George R.R. Martin himself still wouldn’t mind if one of those “possible avenues” to be explored were a movie. He chimed in with a blog post last night, saying,

Sure, I love the idea. Why not? What fantasist would not love the idea of going out with an epic hundred million feature film? And the recent success of the IMAX experience shows that the audience is there for such a movie. If we build it, they will come. But will we build it? I have no bloody idea.

As we go forward, I expect I will have a voice in all these decisions. But mine will only be one voice among many, and there are all sorts of other factors that can come into play. I will say, I am incredibly fortunate in having partners like HBO, and David Benioff and Dan Weiss. Seven seasons, ten seasons, with or without one or two feature films… in the end, all that matters is that we tell a great story, with a great end.

It seems the one thing everyone agrees on is that telling the story in the best way possible is what’s most important, which is encouraging no matter what happens. So what do you think? Team movie? Team “HBO already costs enough”? Team “oh my God they’re going to catch up to the books soon and the world will end who even cares?”

(via Polygon)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?