More Details About ‘House of the Dragon’ at SDCC

As mentioned yesterday, Warner Bros Discovery will be bringing tons of content to San Diego Comic-Con, including House of the Dragon.  Now they’ve revealed new details about their plans.

The House of the Dragon panel will feature both showrunners, Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, as well as George RR Martin.  Cast members Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best, Fabien Frankel, Graham McTavish, Milly Alcock, and Emily Carey are also slated to appear.  The panel will be moderated by Jason Concepcion and will be in Hall H.  While they haven’t confirmed a date, historical precedent for Game of Thrones says it’ll probably be on Friday.  This is just a guess on my part, though.  Who knows what will actually happen.  Other HBO shows have been placed on Saturday before, such as Westworld in 2019.  So it’s anyone’s guess, really.

The panel isn’t the only presence the highly anticipated Game of Thrones prequel will have at SDCC.  Convention attendees will have a chance to use a new AR App called House of the Dragon: DracARys.  The app will have ‘full functionality’ on July 25th, after the convention, but will be available for download on July 20th.  It sounds like convention attendees will get some fun opportunities others won’t get, including integration in an offsite activation.  Fans at home will have to wait until the 25th.

Speaking of the offsite activation, it’ll be called House of the Dragon: The Dragon’s Den.  The activation will be at the MLK Promenade across from the Marriott Marquis and Marina.  It will be open 11:00am – 6:30pm from Thursday to Saturday, and 11:00am – 4:30pm on Sunday.  Attendees will follow a Dragonkeeper, who will guide them through seven ‘phases’ of the experience.  They will have a chance to adopt a virtual dragon egg to take home and ‘hatch’ through the AR app.  

Tickets for the experience will be available through HBO Max Drop Zones around the convention.  The Drops Zones will apparently have some neat swag and other perks available as well.  It’s not clear if these Drop Zones and the Dragon’s Den are located in the same place, but I wouldn’t think they’d be too terribly difficult to find.  My guess is that they won’t be too far and there will be plenty of signage to direct us towards them.  Worse comes to worst, show up at the Dragon’s Den and just ask where the Drop Zones are. 

It’s also a bit unclear if the tickets at the Drop Zones are the only way to get into the activation, or if there will be a standby line as well.  With the Game of Thrones activations in the past, there was a standby line.  But it took many many hours to get through.  I got in line around 6:00 am one morning and was fairly far up in line, but it still took over two hours to get into it once it actually opened.

The ticketing idea is a pretty good one.  I suspect the demand for it will be incredibly high.  Despite the controversial ending to Game of Thrones, the fanbase is still pretty huge.  We’re all eager to see if this show will have the parts of the franchise we love the most.  This will be our first chance to find out.  I’ll certainly be giving the show a fair chance.  The Targaryen lore was always my favorite part anyway.

House of the Dragon will premiere on August 12th on HBO Max.

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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