Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are working on several upcoming Netflix projects, and here's what we know about them so far. In 2019, following Game of Thrones derided season 8, the showrunners signed a five-year, $250 million writing, producing, and directing deal with the streaming service. According to Variety, the competition to lure the creative duo away from HBO was fierce and came down to a three-way bidding war between Netflix, Amazon Studios, and Disney. Before signing Weiss and Benioff, Netflix had successfully forged agreements with other powerhouse talents Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, Jenji Kohan, Brad Falchuk, and Janet Mock.
Even before Game of Thrones reached its conclusion, Weiss and Benioff were lining up their next projects. In 2018, THR announced the twosome would be writing and producing a new trilogy of Star Wars movies for Disney's Lucasfilm. the first of which was set to be released in 2022 (In October 2019, Weiss and Benioff would no longer oversee the films due to their new commitment to Netflix.) The duo was also developing the controversial slavery sci-fi drama Confederate for HBO. The series took place in an alternate timeline, with the South successfully seceding from the Union and slavery remaining a lauded and integral institution (In January 2020, Confederate was canceled.) In the wake of their deal with Netflix, Weiss and Benioff signed on to produce a film based on the graphic novel Lovecraft for Warner Bros. Since announcing the deal in December 2019, the untitled project appears to have stalled.
As HBO moves ahead with its Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, which begins filming in April and chronicles the story of the House of Targaryen 300 years before Daenerys Targaryen conquered multiple cities and reduced King's Landing to rubble, there are three more Game of Thrones spinoffs are in the works. However, Weiss and Benioff, the driving creative forces behind Game of Thrones, have left Westeros behind. Since their move to Netflix, Weiss and Benioff have been slow to churn out content (they directed the 2020 stand-up special Leslie Jones: Time Machine), reinforcing doubts about whether they can develop multiple projects simultaneously after being singularly focused on Game of Thrones. However, the duo appears to be hitting their stride with three shows and one film in the planning and/or production stage.
Weiss, Benioff, and Alexander Woo (True Blood) are set to write and executive produce an English language adaptation of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Also serving as executive producers are Rian Johnson for T Street Productions (Knives Out), Brad Pitt for Plan B Entertainment (Moonlight), and Rosamund Pike for Primitive Streak. The series will cover all three of the critically-acclaimed Chinese writer's books: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End. The novels tell the story of humankind's attempt to contact alien civilizations, leading to the revelation of an impending invasion. Cixin made history in 2015 when he became the first Asian to win the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel for The Three-Body Problem.
This is the first project Weiss and Benioff are attached to as writers since joining Netflix. “Liu Cixin’s trilogy is the most ambitious science-fiction series we’ve read, taking readers on a journey from the 1960s until the end of time, from life on our pale blue dot to the distant fringes of the universe,” Benioff and Weiss said in a joint statement. The project is still in the early developmental stages, and given the breadth of the material, there's no accurate timeline for when the show will drop.
Weiss and Benioff serve as executive producers on The Chair, a six-episode, half-hour dramedy series. The show stars Killing Eve's Sandra Oh, who plays Ji-Yoon, the English department chair at a major university. The Chair was created by actress Amanda Peet (Benioff's wife) and Annie Julia Wyman. Wyman co-wrote the pilot, and Peet will serve as showrunner. The show will also feature regulars Nana Mensah (New Amsterdam), Bob Balaban (The Politician), David Morse (Blindspot), and Everly Carganilla (Yes Day), who are joining Oh, The Morning Show's Jay Duplass, and Two and a Half-Men's Holland Taylor. Ji Yong Lee, Mallory Low, Marcia DeBonis, Ron Crawford, Ella Rubin, and Bob Stephenson will have guest roles. Not much is known about the plot, but Mensah will play Yasmin "Yaz" McKay, a popular professor and Ji-Yoon's colleague. Balaban plays professor Elliot Mentz. Morse plays Paul Larson, the university's dean, and Carganilla plays Ji-Yoon's daughter, Ju-Hee "Ju Ju" Kim. No official release date has been announced, but production is underway in Pittsburgh, PA.
Metal Lords will serve as Weiss and Benioff's first Netflix film. Jaeden Martell (Knives Out), Isis Hainsworth (Emma.), and Adrian Greensmith, who will be making his film debut, will star in the movie about two kids trying to start a heavy metal band who attempt to recruit a cellist to help them win a Battle of the Bands. Peter Sollet (Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) is directing. Weiss penned the script without long-time writing partner Benioff who will executive produce along with Bernadette "Bernie" Caulfield (Game of Thrones) and Robin Fisichella (Ma). Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello who has appeared in the musical documentaries Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Iron Maiden: Flight 666, and Bruce Springsteen’s High Hopes, serves as Metal Lords executive music producer. The Netflix movie is slated for a global release later this year.
Weiss and Benioff are also adapting Richard Powers' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory into a television show for Netflix. Powers' 2018 book follows the lives of nine characters, including a Vietnam veteran, the child of Indian immigrants, an artist, an attorney, and a stenographer who all become active in preventing deforestation after developing close relationships with trees. Richard Robbins (12 Monkeys) wrote the pilot script and will serve as an executive producer alongside Benioff, Weiss, X-Men's Hugh Jackman, a self-proclaimed fan of the book, and Caulfield. Powers has signed on to co-produce.
Netflix described The Overstory as "a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of the natural world." According to Deadline, Jackman could act in the series, but his involvement in front of the camera relies heavily on the length of the development process and if and when the series gets greenlit by Netflix. CEO Reed Hastings gushed about The Overstory during an interview with The New York Times in November 2020, a good sign for the small-screen adaptation moving forward.
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