HBO’s cancelled Game of Thrones prequel gets a behind the scenes reveal, but don’t expect a revival

Before House of the Dragon, HBO was working on a different Game of Thrones prequel, and there’s now been a first look at the cancelled show.

Codenamed Blood Moon, the HBO show was originally planned to serve as a prequel series set around 5000 years before the main show, but the network ultimately decided to cancel it after several production issues and an internally poorly received pilot. It was meant to cover the Long Night, with a big focus on the white walkers, and apparently cost $30 million, but I guess you can just waste money like that when you’re HBO? In any case, we’ve never seen anything concrete of the show, until this weekend, when makeup artist Flora Moody shared a post on Instagram with some behind the scenes looks at her work on actor Naomi Watts.

The shots obviously don’t show much, they mostly just look like test shots of Watts to see how she’d look on screen. As with the rest of Game of Thrones’ live action outings, the costuming and hair and makeup do all look great! But this is clearly just someone sharing work that they’re proud of (where they were meant to or not), so don’t expect this to be some kind of big brained marketing scheme to bring it back. Besides, HBO has clearly found success in keeping the Game of Thrones fandom alive and well fed through House of the Dragon.

Speaking of which, last month House of the Dragon actor, and Doctor Who himself, Matt Smith might have slipped up and given a more specific release date for season 2 of House of the Dragon. Officially speaking, all we know is that it’s coming this summer, though Smith did seem to have a particular month in mind. Max released a teaser trailer for the prequel series back in December, and yep, it certainly looks like more of that classic Game of Thrones drama.