Entertainment
Kit Harington Says the Jon Snow Show Isn’t Dead After All
By Erica Coleman · May 20, 2026
The Jon Snow spinoff was dead. Then it wasn’t. Then it was again. Now Kit Harington says it’s just “on the backburner for the moment.”
Speaking at Motor City Comic Con on Saturday, Harington gave the most candid and hopeful update yet on the project that has been in development limbo since its initial announcement in 2022.
“It’s open knowledge that we tried to make a Jon Snow show for a little while, and just couldn’t,” he said. “We couldn’t find the right thing, and so we put it down for the moment.”
That phrase — “for the moment” — is doing a lot of work. In October 2024, Harington had said the project was “off the table.” Sunday’s comments walked that back. The show is shelved, not buried.
The reason it’s worth revisiting is what has happened around it in 2026. In January, a Hollywood Reporter piece revealed the project might be back in active development — and that it could bring back Arya Stark alongside Jon Snow, the sibling relationship that was one of the original series’ most beloved dynamics.
HBO programming head Casey Bloys said as recently as November 2024: “Maybe we’ll try again.” Nothing is officially confirmed. But the door is clearly not closed.
Harington’s Motor City comments also confirmed what the show would have been about — a concept that author George R.R. Martin had outlined in a January 2026 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The show would have picked up Jon in solitude beyond the Wall, struggling with PTSD from everything he had survived and done. He would have chased away his direwolf Ghost. He would have discarded his sword Longclaw. He would have spent his days building cabins and burning them down — a man trying to erase himself. And at the end of the series, he would have died for good.
It is a darker, more stripped-down concept than most GoT fans might have expected — not another wars-and-dragons story but a character study about trauma, identity, and whether a man who has been used as a weapon for his entire life can find peace. Harington said Sunday that this direction was part of what drew him to the project in the first place.
“I did feel there was something left to say,” he said. “And I did think the idea of exploring something kind of entirely around him, or a lot around him, would be interesting. Because remember in Game of Thrones, you’re part of a huge ensemble.”
The challenge the project could never solve was finding a story that justified the return. Game of Thrones ended with one of the most divisive series finales in television history — a finale that gave Jon Snow a conclusion that Harington himself has said he thinks was right. “I think he ended well. I think that he went where he was meant to,” he said. “So if you pick him up again, it needs to be for the right reasons.”
They couldn’t find those reasons. Not yet.
What makes the conversation relevant now is the context around it. House of the Dragon Season 3 arrives on HBO on June 21 — five weeks from now. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms just wrapped its first season. HBO is actively investing in the Game of Thrones universe on multiple fronts. If any moment is right for a Jon Snow revival conversation, the summer of 2026 — with the franchise more active than it has been since the original series ended — is it.
Harington isn’t saying yes. He’s not saying no. “For the moment” is the most specific thing he would offer. Jon Snow has died before and come back. Whether his spinoff does the same depends on whether someone — Harington, HBO, a writer — can finally crack the story that justifies it.