Skip to main content

George R.R. Martin, author of the popular book series "A Song of Ice and Fire," which inspired the hit HBO series "Game of Thrones" poses in Toronto, on Monday, March 12, 2012Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press

All diehard Game of Thrones devotees had better sit down for today's breaking news: Your beloved TV series could be making the move to the big screen.

And while these sort of dream scenarios very often turn out to be a case of wishful thinking by some fan blogger, this time the suggestion comes from George R.R. Martin, the man who conceived the medieval-themed story in the first place.

Earlier this week, the author suggested to The Hollywood Reporter that turning Game of Thrones into a movie may be the only way to properly wrap up his complex, multi-layered saga.

"It all depends on how long the series runs," said Martin at the show's fourth-season premiere in New York. "Do we run for seven years? Do we run for eight? Do we run for 10? The books get bigger and bigger… We might need a feature [film] to tie things up."

Keep in mind that HBO has yet to determine how many seasons of the hit show it plans to produce, and Martin still has to write the final two books in the series – and by his own admission, Martin does not exactly crank the books out at record speed.

More notably, the current TV version of Game of Thrones is fantastically expensive to create. For the upcoming fourth season, production costs reportedly exceeded $6-million (U.S.) per episode.

Since Thrones takes place in a surreal, magical world, exotic locales are required to recreate the real-world setting for King's Landing, the capital of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.

Over four seasons, the series has filmed in Iceland, Morocco, Ireland, Malta, Croatia and other locations.

And Martin has no intention of cheaping it out should his story become a movie. In his view, a Game of Thrones movie would be "something with a feature budget, like $100-million for two hours. Those dragons get real big, you know."

But wait, there's more: Martin said that another option would be to create a feature film based on Tales of Dunk and Egg, a series of three prequel novellas he wrote several years back.

Only slightly less fantastical than Thrones, Dunk and Egg revolves around a group of offbeat characters, including Ser Duncan the Tall, who resided in the Westeros region a century before the events depicted in his book series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is the source material for Thrones.

"They could be the basis for [a film]," said Martin. "I have written these three stories and I have about a dozen more."

And although there are still many rivers to cross in the TV version of Game of Thrones, there's speculation that any potential feature film in the franchise will be produced by Warner Bros, if only because they know how to handle a good dragon tale: The studio has earned more than $1-billion worldwide with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Season four of Game of Thrones begins April 6 on HBO and HBO Canada.

Interact with The Globe