TV & Film

House Of The Dragon Has Been Planning A Huge Naval Battle For 3 Years, And I Totally Get Why They Hired Titanic’s Production Manager For It

April 2, 2025

Fans of what one could call spectacle television (anything mega-budget and/or on the sci-fi/fantasy side of things) realize that they might not get new seasons of their favorite shows on a yearly basis. Series like Game of Thrones and its incredibly successful prequel spinoff, House of the Dragon, take a lot of work before, during and after filming. While the 2025 TV schedule won’t bring HOTD Season 3 to our screens just yet, the upcoming installment is currently filming, and that giant naval battle we’re all looking forward to has actually been in the works for three years. Luckily, they have a production manager from Titanic on board to help them get it all done.

What’s Been Said About The Naval Battle House Of The Dragon Has Been Planning For Three Years?

Many fans of House of the Dragon were incredibly disappointed when Season 2 ended without getting to one of the major battles described in Fire & Blood, the George R.R. Martin book on which the show is based. This, of course, is The Battle of the Gullet, which is known in the lore as one of the bloodiest sea battles in Westeros history.

However, the ever increasing civil war between the Blacks and the Greens of the Targaryen family tree will be a major part of the third season, and showrunner Ryan Condal confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the devastating Gullet sequences have been in the works for a long time, and said:

In many ways, the Gullet has been on the minds of the production for about three years now and trying to figure out how we were going to mount it in a way that was both producible and exciting, thrilling. The planning that has gone into this… basically all departments working in concert to really make a thing that nobody has ever done before.

Can you imagine? Working on one battle for three whole years, and doing it while having to work out innumerable other sequences/story issues at the same time? If anything, this speaks to how dedicated the team is to making as faithful and impressive of an adaptation as possible, even if Martin isn’t exactly happy about some of the changes that have been made so far.

As noted previously, one of the executive producers of HOTD is Kevin de la Noy, who just so happens to have experience working on big scenes set at sea, because he was a production manager on the aforementioned blockbuster, Titanic. He helped with the prep work to launch this major sequence, which will include Targaryen dragon action and lots of folks who will absolutely die horribly. About de la Noy and the battle as a whole, Condal continued:

He comes in having worked on one of the biggest naval sequences ever put to film. But, yeah, it’s a stunning thing. I would like to think that this is probably the most complex sequence that’s ever been done for television, not necessarily the most expensive or the longest shoot or anything like that, but just based on the number of moving pieces, the amount of different disciplines, media that have to be blended together to achieve success because you’re talking about sea and ships and dragons and action.

It definitely sounds like fans will be rewarded for the wait whenever the third season finally hits HBO, and hopefully The Battle of the Gullet will be enough of a game-changing spectacle that any differences from the book won’t matter to viewers that much overall.

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