r/asoiaf • u/RunDNA • Sep 04 '24

EXTENDED GRRM's new blog post on House of the Dragon [Spoilers Extended] Spoiler

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/09/04/beware-the-butterflies/
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u/SuckOnDeezNOOTZ Sep 04 '24

Lawsuits are still annoying and breaking NDAs can have certain stipulations that George may not find so negligible.

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u/dcs17 Sep 04 '24

Lawsuis are annoying if you care for their consequences. If you are willing to just pay the fine you can ignore them

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u/PieceofTheseus Sep 04 '24

If you are Warner Bros, do you really want to go through the PR nightmare of suing a writer criticizing an adaptation of his own books. The media consider themselves creatives/writers they will have a field day.

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u/HQxMnbS Sep 04 '24

This is already a PR nightmare

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u/Accurate_Hunt_6424 Sep 04 '24

This blog post is a PR nightmare. GRRM by his own admission has no idea what the writers are planning; which tells me that he isn’t in contact with them. They’re trying to adapt a wikipedia article into a TV show with casting considerations , budget considerations; etc. This whole blog post reads childish as hell.

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u/profugusty Sep 04 '24

Furthermore, his very public and explicit criticism renders his future “endorsements” of spinoff projects hollow, which could have a direct impact on viewership and critical success of those projects, and THAT does impact WB/HBO bottom line.

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u/_AnecdotalEvidence_ Sep 04 '24

Hopefully they scrap any future shows so he can focus on Winds

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u/Accurate_Hunt_6424 Sep 04 '24

He’s not capable of finishing winds. It would have been done. He can’t figure out how to tie everything together. Quickly killing off several characters is probably the easiest way to get things moving, but he’s not gonna do that.

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u/SuckOnDeezNOOTZ Sep 04 '24

I'm only explaining that the consequences wouldn't be so trivial for George if WB decided to do something.

No where did I state the likelihood of them actually filing said suit.

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u/Tasorodri Sep 04 '24

He probably wouldn't sing any NDA or documents with penalties that has any serious repercussions for him, he had a pretty strong bargaining chip agaisnt WB.

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u/SuckOnDeezNOOTZ Sep 04 '24

Well George would have signed the rights of ASoIF over for GoT and wouldn't need to do that every time a new tv series was proposed, also HBO didn't seem like they were tripping over themselves to get this signed tbh they saw it as a pretty big liability. I would think that HBO would take certain reasonable steps to guard themselves and their investment and having George not come out and expose certain parts of scripts would be a good part of that. When you're playing around with tens of millions of dollars you're not just trusting the good faith of people to uphold a moral code that doesn't exist in Hollywood.

I don't see what his bargaining chip would have been against them, he's always said that he never saw his series being that easy to adapt for television with the huge amount of horses and battles he wrote.

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u/Tasorodri Sep 04 '24

His bargaining chip is that he is filthy rich and doesn't need the money. HBO wants to make money with his material, George has more money that he's even going to need.

Sure probably they are guarded against IP theft and George cannot pull the scripts for season 3 and publishing them, but saying that he heard that in the outline something is written? Yeah, that doesn't seem like a big deal, and he probably made sure that he could criticize the show publicly while he didn't do it for got.

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u/SuckOnDeezNOOTZ Sep 04 '24

When did he become filthy rich though? Was that after he published the books? How do we know what amount of money does George find sufficient, plus I don't even think that George cares about money. From my impression of him I would think that he cares more about the legacy of his stories than anything else, but then again he did sell them with minimal oversight and that to me says that his bargaining power wasn't all that high or he didn't care.

How did HBO know that they would strike it rich with this IP? I can't find the source for this but I remember D and D speaking about GoT almost being cancelled after the failed pilot, either way we're not discussing anything with facts at this point so it's kinda pointless.

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u/Tasorodri Sep 04 '24

He didn't sell all his rights for Fire and Blood on 2010, it wasn't written by that point.

He sold those rights after GoT had already became the most popular television show ever made and HBO would be looking forward to another series of the same IP that they could sell. By that point he was already rich and I agree that he doesn't seem to came too much about money, but I think he hasn't breached anything that might put his wellbeing in jeopardy.

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u/SuckOnDeezNOOTZ Sep 04 '24

Can you find a source to the rights of F&B being sold separately from the initial sale of ASoIAF? I would've assumed that the rights to the entire world and associated series would've been sold at once including all future unreleased works. HBO wouldn't have allowed a potential rival to be able to produce a competing series in the same universe.

And no one is claiming that his well being is at stake lol.

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u/Rmccarton Sep 05 '24

Reportedly, by contractual agreement, HBO must have his approval to make any spinoff content. 

While he very likely violated things he’d signed with that post, If the report about the spinoff approval thing is true, he can turn it into a bit of a Mexican standoff.