The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones is set to premiere next April, meaning you’ll have to find some other incestuous fantasy show to talk about with your aunt when Thanksgiving 2019 rolls around, but worry not. There’s a huge number of other George R.R. Martin shows on the horizon, from the Game of Thrones prequel series in development at HBO to that sci-fi horror one—and now it looks like we can add a few more about superheroes to the list.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Hulu is finalizing a deal to secure the rights to Martin’s Wild Cards franchise and develop it into two separate series.
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The massive Wild Cards series spans dozens of novels, focused on an alternate history in which a deadly virus nicknamed the “Wild Card” broke out in New York City after WWII and quickly spread across the world, killing just about everyone. Those who lived, though, were changed—some lucky survivors developed god-like superpowers, while the significantly less lucky ones turned into fucked-up mutants.
The people with sick-ass powers are called “Aces,” and the folks who wound up with pretty lame powers are called “Deuces,” in keeping with the whole playing card thing the series has going. The mutants are referred to as “Jokers,” which seems kind of harsh—it’s not their fault they were terribly deformed by a virus, and they probably don’t deserve to be shamed and belittled for it—but hey, whatever.
Unlike A Song of Ice and Fire, which inspired Game of Thrones, Martin isn’t the sole author of the Wild Cards series—he dreamed up the idea with some other sci-fi author friends in the late 80s, and since then, he’s acted as an editor for the franchise alongside co-editor Melissa M. Snodgrass, working with more than 40 writers on the sprawling assortment of books and stand-alone short stories.
Martin and Snodgrass are on board as executive producers, with the show’s scripts to be penned by The Secret Circle‘s Andrew Miller. Hulu is reportedly in the process of building writer’s rooms for the two new series right now.
It’s unclear which (if any) specific books in the series will be used as the foundation for the shows, but there’s definitely plenty of source material to mine. And since this definitely feels like Hulu’s blatant attempt to ride the coattails of Game of Thrones into their own fantasy franchise, we’ll probably have to watch some mutants fuck at some point.
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