HBO's Game of Thrones wraps up its eighth and final season this Sunday, but what will the show's creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff do next? Apart from a new trilogy of Star Wars films for Disney, Weiss and Benioff are reportedly currently visiting studios looking for big "overall" deals. According to Deadline, Weiss and Benioff have met with as many as six "big media companies" for new "overall" deals that would cover TV, film, and streaming projects that they could write, direct, and produce. Those said to be in the mix are HBO, Disney, Comcast, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, according to Deadline. Of course, Weiss and Benioff are already partnered with HBO and Disney for Game of Thrones and Star Wars, respectively, so that could impact negotiations. According to Deadline, the duo are not looking to "rush into a decision." Given the massive success of Game of Thrones, it certainly seems like Weiss and Benioff certainly have bargaining power. Overall deals can be very lucrative. For example, comedy legend Michael Schur is reportedly being paid $25 million per year to stay at NBC, while Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes is being paid $100 million for her overall deal at Netflix. In addition to the Star Wars series, the first movie of which is scheduled to premiere in 2022, Weiss and Benioff are working on the controversial HBO show Confederate. As for Game of Thrones, the final episode airs this Sunday, May 19 on HBO. For more on the show, you can check out GameSpot's review and recap of Episode 5, "The Bells."<doc-sep>South China Morning Post China and Russia have repeated their commitment to strengthen their relationship as the White House announced the first summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin next month. The June 16 meeting is widely seen as an olive branch from the US President to his Russian counterpart and some observers said it may be another attempt by Washington to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing. In a phone conversation on Tuesday with President Xi Jinping’s top diplomatic aide Yang Jiechi, Putin said relations between the two countries were “the best in history” and said it was essential for the two leaders to maintain close contact, according to China’s state news agency Xinhua.Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Putin made similar comments a week ago when he and Xi launched via video link a project to build four new nuclear reactors in China using Russian technology. At the same event Xi also spoke highly of their “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination”. Xinhua said Putin also pledged to work with China to preserve global strategic stability and defend multilateralism – a possible veiled reference to Washington’s drive to use its relationship with its allies to target authoritarian governments. We will share space flight components with China: Russian space agency Yang, who was visiting Moscow for strategic and security talks, again stated China’s commitment to strengthening relations in the call with Putin, which touched on “several pressing global issues” according to the TASS news agency. “China is ready to work with Russia to comprehensively implement the consensus reached by the two presidents and turn the high-level political mutual trust into more results from strategic coordination,” Yang said, according to Xinhua. During his visit, Yang also co-chaired the annual bilateral strategic security consultations, a dialogue mechanism set up in 2005, along with Russian security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev on Tuesday. Analysts noted that Beijing and Moscow are edging closer together in the face of mounting pressure from the West. Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University, said the Geneva summit showed Washington was trying to ease tensions with Moscow. “The Biden administration has softened its stance and tried to stabilise ties with Russia since it imposed sanctions on Moscow in April. It has become apparent that Washington will be more focused on China,” he said. China’s top diplomat heads to Russia on security talks mission Beijing suspected that the previous US administration also wanted to drive a wedge between China and Russia, with Donald Trump making repeated efforts to readmit Moscow to the Group of 7. Vladimir Portyakov, deputy director of the Institute of Far Eastern Affairs at the Russian Academy of Sciences, also described the Biden-Putin summit as an attempt to “slow down the Russian-Chinese rapprochement, and if successful, to pull Russia and China away from each other.” “I hope that Moscow understands this and will not play ‘equidistant’ from Washington and Beijing. I would also like to believe that Beijing will stop considering relations with the United States as a ‘priority of priorities’ and will gradually reduce its importance in China’s foreign policy,” he said. But Zhu said: “Both Beijing and Moscow have a growing interest in working with each other to confront the US and other Western countries. Strengthening their coordination is their best choice, and probably the only option to some extent.” In an editorial on Wednesday, the tabloid Global Times, controlled by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, also attributed close China-Russian ties to “the US and its main allies’ suppression of the two countries”. Artyom Lukin, an associate professor at Russia’s Far Eastern Federal University, also said both China and Russia need each other. While Moscow has increasingly leaned on Beijing economically after the Covid-19 crisis, Beijing relies on Russia when it comes to the military-strategic realm and particularly hi-end military technology. “Moreover, the position of Russia may be crucial in the event of an increasingly likely military conflict between China and the US. Strong relations with Moscow would, at a minimum, secure China’s northern and Central Asian borders – and it cannot even be ruled out that Russia would provide direct assistance to Beijing in a Sino-US war,” he said. Lukin said that the Geneva summit was likely to bring about some short-term normalisation in US-Russia relations, but deep-seated tensions and disagreements made a full rapprochement unlikely. Putin threatens to ‘knock out the teeth’ of Russia’s opponents “I don’t think Washington will be seriously trying to drive a wedge between China and Russia. The people in the Biden administration are smart enough to understand it is not going to work. “Even if they try to do that, such a policy would almost certainly fail because the Russia-China political relationship is quite robust and will remain so for the foreseeable future,” he said. But Zhu said Moscow and Beijing were unlikely to form a full alliance. “China’s top diplomatic priority is to prevent further disengagement with the US and the West. I doubt that a strategic alliance will be in Beijing’s interests or help achieve that goal,” he said.More from South China Morning Post:Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin to hold first summit in Geneva on June 16Nuclear energy: China, Russia agree to boost ties in ‘strategic priority’ areaXi and Putin to mark expansion of China-Russia nuclear power project ahead of US talksThis article China and Russia once again pledge to strengthen ties as White House announces first Putin-Biden summit first appeared on South China Morning PostFor the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2021.<doc-sep>What the Hell Were Weiss and Benioff Thinking While Writing the Final Season of 'Game of Thrones'? By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 14, 2019 | I am not an expert on Game of Thrones; we have plenty of folks who cover that well. I have never read the books. I don’t know all the theories. And I could not tell you the exact line of succession. But it doesn’t take more than a casual viewer to see what a trainwreck these last few episodes of Game of Thrones have been, and I think most folks agree that the biggest problem with it is that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have tried unsuccessfully to cram two (or more) seasons of television into six episodes, two of which are all battles. That makes for little character development and a lot of whiplash. So what the hell happened? Honestly, I keep circling back to 2015, when George R.R. Martin suggested that ten seasons of the HBO series were necessary to tell his entire story, and HBO agreed. “We started this journey with David and Dan. It’s their vision. Would I love the show to go 10 years as both a fan and a network executive? Absolutely,” said HBO programming president Michael Lombardo. And the thing is, HBO really wanted ten seasons, which — in 2015 — felt kind of unnecessary given the fact that Dany had spent much of her time walking around. But it might have been nice while Dany was doing all that walking around to foreshadow some Mad Queen tendencies. At any rate, HBO made a plan to sit down with Weiss and Benioff to discuss the future of the series, and they went into the conversation thinking, “If they weren’t comfortable going beyond seven seasons, I trust them implicitly and trust that’s the right decision—as horrifying as that is to me. What I’m not going to do is have a show continue past where the creators believe where they feel they’ve finished with the story.” At the time, Weiss and Benioff were insistent that they were not going to do more than seven seasons. And apparently, there was some conversation of continuing the series with new showrunners, which I suspect may have been the leverage HBO used to convince Weiss and Benioff to create a six-episode eighth season to wrap it all up with them at the helm, lest HBO replace them (Martin himself, at the time, suggested a feature film was necessary to wrap it all up). In other words, Weiss and Benioff only begrudgingly took on the eighth season and that begrudgingness shows. It feels like they’d already checked out, and started pitching Confederacy, which drew immediate backlash from the Internet. While HBO initially had Weiss and Benioff’s back, the network quietly abandoned the project I assume in the midst of Weiss and Benioff writing the final season of GoT. It may have engendered bad feelings, on top of HBO’s possible strong-arm tactics to get Benioff and Weiss to extend another season. Add to that the fact that Benioff and Weiss were tapped to guide the next Star Wars trilogy in early 2018, which probably took focus away from shooting the final season. All of which is to say: The attention of Weiss and Benioff may have been divided while they were writing a shortened final eighth season they didn’t want to write for a series that needed 10 full seasons and a movie to properly wrap up and Weiss and Benioff may have also felt a little betrayed by HBO because it didn’t fully support their terrible idea of a show about an alt-history in which the South won the Civil War and were also looking ahead to Star Wars, all of which resulted in this half-assed, haphazard, too-short final season of Game of Thrones. And the thing is, I know that Benioff is a better writer than this, and not just because of the first seven seasons, but because 25th Hour was a brilliant f**king movie and his novel City of Thieves is one of the few that I’ve actually read twice. If the two had really and truly been committed to writing a proper ending to the series, they certainly have the talent. I think they may have lost patience and in doing so have tarnished the legacy of the series and dampened enthusiasm for future Game of Thrones spin-offs. The good news, I guess, is that their divided attention has paid off because their Star Wars trilogy is next in line: The next #StarWars film to be released after the end of the Skywalker Saga will be by #GameOfThrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. $DIS — Attractions Magazine (@Attractions) May 14, 2019 Congrats, Weiss and Benioff! I look forward to two very good Star Wars movies followed by a bed-shitting end to the trilogy once you lose interest in this project and start looking ahead to your next one. ← 'It' Meets 'Sharknado' In 'Clownado' Trailer | Game of Thrones Book Reader Review: 'The Bells' Season 8 Episode 5 → Dustin is the founder and co-owner of Pajiba. You may email him here, follow him on Twitter, or listen to his weekly TV podcast, Podjiba. Header Image Source: Getty Images<doc-sep>
EXCLUSIVE: While millions will be tuning in to watch the Game of Thrones finale Sunday night that they wrote and directed which decides once and for all who sits on the Iron Throne and rules Westeros, Deadline hears David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have six studios waiting on a cliffhanger over what they do next. Those companies are vying to be the place where the duo next creates, writes, directs and produces film and television projects going forward. Deadline hears that Benioff and Weiss have met with six big media companies that want the duo to sign an overall global deal with them for film, TV and streaming projects. They’ve met with HBO/WarnerMedia, Disney, Comcast, as well as the streaming companies Netflix, Amazon and Apple. They have ties to several of these companies, and won’t rush into a decision, I’m told. After all, when they created Game of Thrones based on the George RR Martin novels, the show took off so quickly that the duo has focused solely on it for the past decade. They plowed past the plot blueprint established by Martin’s early novels and in later seasons have taken the story beyond the author’s narrative. While they are aligned to create, write and produce one of the next Star Wars trilogies (Rian Johnson is doing his own, with others in the works), they want to be more prolific but they don’t want to be a factory like some of the producers with huge TV-centric deals. I’m sure finding another big TV followup to Game of Thrones will be a major priority; but being able to take advantage of this new multi-platform landscape is also a priority. No one can fault their strategy of having concentrated solely on GoT: they’ve won the Prime Time Emmy for Best Drama the last three years the show was eligible, for a drama that went against the binge-ing release strategy of streaming rivals, and remained the strongest water cooler chatter zeitgeist show through its run, with a finale that will shatter ratings that have been sky high for this final season. They’ve met with the principals across all the platforms at all six major companies. They have relationships at many of these places. The Star Wars films are at Disney and LucasFilm, while Benioff wrote for Universal and Donna Langley a Kurt Cobain project, and they are poised to adapt the prison break tale Dirty White Boys for Emma Watts at Fox. They both have movies ties pre-GoT at Warner Bros, where Benioff scripted Troy and Weiss did script work on Poseidon. The longstanding relationship at HBO is also a very strong one. Those meetings were set up before the WGA order for writers to fire their agents. I’m told that Benioff & Weiss adhered to the WGA’s Working Rule 23 and terminated CAA in connection with all Guild covered services and that they will be represented by their longtime lawyer Gretchen Rush on the deal. CAA continues to represent them as directors. Stay tuned.