The showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff have revelled that they lied a lot of about important things of the original Bible TV show to get the series made, during the pitching process. They believed that the series wouldn’t be approved by HBO` executive if they showed a certain key aspect of the saga.
During David Benioff and DB Weiss’s original pitch to the premium cable network, they promised their adaptation of George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series would become the channel’s biggest show.
The one thing steering then HBO president Michael Lombardo to giving Thrones the go-ahead was the fact he believed it would not feature a lot of battle sequences, something Benioff and Weiss falsely reassured him on.
The producers were hoping that nobody at HBO had read the best-selling novel or other materials related to the novels before making a decision on picking it up. The pair admitted in the new behind-the-scenes book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon “the show was exactly what we told them it wasn’t,” per The Independent.
“We knew most of the people making the decisions were not going to read 4,000 pages [of Martin’s books] and get to the dragons getting bigger and the [major battles],” Weiss added.
“We were banking on them not finding out until it was too late.” The company was reportedly worried about spending a lot on a TV show that did not resonate with its viewers, especially after they failed with the series “Rome” which had a budget of $100 million, and it was axed after a single season on the network. Taking risks on unproven series is difficult, especially when it means you could lose a lot of money in the process.
Fortunately, Game of Thrones was an enormous success around the globe. The series was launched in 2011 and it ended in 2019 after 8 seasons.
