The highly anticipated Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon will likely arrive in 2022, an HBO executive has revealed. Variety got the scoop during the Television Critics Assocation press event, where HBO programming chief Casey Bloys told the site that 2022 is his "best guess" for the show's release date.

There have been multiple Game of Thrones spin-off series in development at any given point over the past several years, especially as the main saga hurtled toward its controversial conclusion in 2019. This particular prequel is not the Naomi Watts-starring show that was cancelled back in November; that show was believed to be titled Bloodmoon and would have been set during the Long Night, a legendary extra-long winter in the series' mythology. Instead, House of the Dragon will focus on the Targaryens and their early conquests in Westeros, which places it just a few hundred, rather than several thousand, years earlier than the main series.

Back in November, when the show was announced, Bloys said HBO "look[s] forward to exploring the origins of House Targaryen and the earlier days of Westeros along with Miguel, Ryan, and George." George is, of course, series creator and author George R.R. Martin, while the other two to which he refers are GoT veteran Miguel Sapochnik, who will serve as showrunner and direct multiple episodes (including the pilot), and writer Ryan Condal, who also serves as co-showrunner.

More recently, Bloys told Variety that the previously planned prequel didn't die due to any particular glaring problems, but simply didn't come together.

"Pilots--sometimes they come together, sometimes they don’t ... And I would say that was very much the case here. There’s nothing I would point to and say 'Oh, this was the problem,'" he reportedly said. In comparison, House of the Dragon is largely based on Martin's 2018 book Fire and Blood, a Targaryen epic written like a history text. "One of the benefits of 'House of the Dragon' is there was a text from George and there was a little bit more of a roadmap," Bloys said.

With this new Game of Thrones show seeming more and more likely to actually happen, one question remains to us: Will George manage to actually finish the next book in the series--not to mention the one after that--before yet another chapter of this story is told on the screen? Here's hoping.