‘House Of The Dragon’ Showrunner Calls Pricey Battle Of The Gullet “Craziest Episode Of TV Ever Made” & Compares It To ‘LOTR’

The “Game of Thrones” franchise is best known for it’s large scale battles just as much as the twisty plots and backstabbing plots, so, when it comes to the third season of “House of the Dragon” arriving this month on HBO Max, showrunner Ryan Condal is doing his best to hype The Battle of the Gullet to be in the realm of Battle of the Bastards, Watchers On The Wall, Battle of Blackwater, and others alongside the “Lord of The Rings” as well.

What happens when factions of dragon riders with massive armies go into a full-on war and is HBO Max is willing to shell-out a king’s ransom for it? Well, we’re going to see more skermishes and Condal is promising that The Battle of Gullet could be as epic/important as a feature film sequence like the Battle of Helm’s Deep from Peter Jackson‘s “Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers,” which is certainly dropping the action sequence gauntlet as it were and hitting the hype machine into overdrive calling it “arguably the craziest episode of television ever made.”

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As Condal explains in a new profile with Entertainment Weekly, the BIG episode is said to be the comulnation of “a four-year quest” to get the epic battle on both sea and sky fiuretion, and wasn’t even sure of they could pull it off with the limitations of a televison budget. “To try to tell this story without doing the Gullet would be trying to film ‘Lord of the Rings’ without doing the Battle of Helm’s Deep. If we were gonna do it, we had to do it right. And that meant dragons and ships and multiple theaters of conflict.”

“House of the Dragon” certainly leans heavily into the violent side of Westeros, so we cannot be entirely shocked that they’re going to go for the gusto in Season 3, with Season 4 said to be the final run. Will they be able to replicate that kind of scale on a TV budget? Stranger things have happened and they’ve done a lot work to outdo previous battles, so we’ll have to wait and see.

The hefty grourp of actors assembled for the next batch of episodes includes Matt Smith, Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Steve Toussaint, Rhys Ifans, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno, Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall, Matthew Needham, James Norton, Tom Bennett, Kieran Bew, Kurt Egyiawan, Freddie Fox, Clinton Liberty, Gayle Rankin, Abubakar Salim, Tom Cullen, Tommy Flanagan, Dan Fogler, Joplin Sibtain, and Barry Sloane.

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Condal is the series showrunner/producer and co-created the TV project alongside author/execuitve producer George R.R. Martin. A team of exec producers consists of Sara Hess, Melissa Bernstein, Kevin de la Noy, Vince Gerardis, David Hancock, and Philippa Goslett. If you weren’t already aware the show was Based on Martin’s existing novel “Fire & Blood,” that explores the history and legacy of the Targaryens. Season 3 of “House of the Dragon” will debut on June 21 and the finale is set for August 9.