Kit Harington thinks a Game of Thrones movie is “possible”

Kit Harington (Jon Snow) recently sat down with IGN to talk about Spooks: The Greater Good, the new spy movie he’s in. Naturally, things quickly turned towards Game of Thrones, as they always do when an actor from this show sits down to talk about anything. “I’ve got a conjoined twin named Herb who lives in my coat pocket,” Harington could say. “Great,” the interviewer would reply, “now about that scene in the latest Game of Thrones episode…”

Oh well, such is the fate of being cast as a lead character on one of the biggest shows on TV. In this latest interview, Harington opened up about the long-simmering possibility of a Game of Thrones feature film, and while he couldn’t confirm anything, he thinks it would work well.

I think it’s possible…I think it lends itself very well to the big screen, Thrones. They put it out on IMAX and apparently it worked surprisingly well. Whenever I’ve seen premieres it’s been on a big cinema screen and it’s felt like it belonged there.

The topic of Game of Thrones making its way to the big screen has been hotly debated for years, with many different parties weighing in. George R.R. Martin, for his part, has gone on record as being in favor of ending the series with a movie. His logic was that, as the books get bigger and bigger in terms of scope, a TV-size budget won’t get the job done. “Those dragons get real big, you know,” he said in 2014.

HBO, on the other hand, isn’t so enthusiastic about the idea. Michael Lombardo, the network’s President of Programming, has said that ending the show with a movie would be unfair to subscribers who have paid to watch Game of Thrones under the assumption that HBO would see it through to the end. According to Lombardo, asking those subscribers to turn around and pay money to see the conclusion on the big screen would be duplicitous.

Then again, the show’s run on IMAX screens has been very successful, and some of the more bombastic moments would look good on a bigger piece of real estate. Personally, I’m more in Lombardo’s camp, although my reasoning is a little different. Part of the reason Game of Thrones is so compelling is because it can afford the time to explore details—about characters, about the world, about the plot. A two or three-hour movie would need to really focus in on the big moments at the expense of the smaller ones. Without all that context, a Game of Thrones movie might look like just any other fantasy blockbuster.

Harington, continuing his interview with IGN, expressed similar feelings.

“I can’t tell you whether they’ll ever do that; I can’t tell you whether they’ll ever want to do that. They wrote it as a TV show and David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] felt it lent itself very well to episodic story-telling. I don’t know. If they want to throw millions and millions of dollars at a two-hour movie in the future I think it would almost have to be the climax of something, rather than a whole series squashed down into two hours. That wouldn’t make a lot of sense.”

Hear, hear, Harington.

• Published on 05/01/2015 at 5:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 05/01/2015 at 5:00 PM CDT