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House of the Dragon: How Many Seasons Will There Be?

House of the Dragon: How Many Seasons Will There Be?
Image credit: HBO

The Targaryen-centered Game of Thrones prequel still has a lot to cover.

It didn’t take long after the finale of Game of Thrones for the House of the Dragon announcement to be made. George Martin ’s brutally beautiful world captivated millions of people, and fortunately, the author had quite a lot of source material to choose from. Seeing how the few Targaryen we got in the original series were immensely popular, HBO understandably went for the dragon-centered prequel.

House of the Dragon is currently on Season 2, and the major events are finally beginning to unfold. With each episode, we’re getting closer to the Dance of Dragons, the epic civil war between two branches of House Targaryen and the main reason we’re watching HotD in the first place. But this begs one important question.

How many seasons of House of the Dragon will there be in total?

Officially, only three seasons have been confirmed — but according to George Martin himself, there will be at least four. In 2023, the author shared that he’d “spent two days locked in a room with Ryan Condal and his writing staff... talking about the third and fourth seasons”, meaning that Season 4 is all but has already happened. But that doesn’t mean there will only be four seasons, does it?

HotD Likely to Go Well Beyond Four Seasons

House of the Dragon: How Many Seasons Will There Be? - image 1

We’re now leaving the realm of statements and delving into speculation, but worry not: we have numbers to back them up. Let’s talk about the progress House of the Dragon has already made on adapting George Martin’s Fire & Blood novel.

Season 1 covered less than 100 pages of the book, and Season 2 is seemingly going for an ever smaller fraction. Meanwhile, there are well over 700 pages in Fire & Blood in total: even if Seasons 3 & 4 pick up the pace and go by twice as quickly, they won’t be able to adapt Fire & Blood in its entirety.

There is only one possible conclusion here: House of the Dragon will most likely be running for well over the already-confirmed four seasons. The series has already perfected the art of time jumps, but there’s little room for such experiments during the Targaryen Civil War itself, and the ending is far too significant to be left out.

To be somewhat conservative in our estimates, we’d speculate that HotD still has at least five to seven seasons left in it. Perhaps, more — but that’s up to the showrunners.

Source: George Martin via Not a Blog