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House of the Dragon keeps moving forward, and actress Olivia Cooke has now made a significant disclosure regarding the shooting of Season 3. The actress, who plays Queen Alicent Hightower in the Game of Thrones prequel, revealed that shooting was supposed to wrap up by October 2025. According to Screenrant, she said,
"We started in April, so we are done in October. We're over halfway and it's massive.It is actually ridiculous. It's actually ridiculous and it's a lot of practical, huge stunt work. It's mad."
Cooke's comment presents one of the strongest schedules to date on when viewers can eagerly anticipate most of the filming being completed. With Season 3's production of House of the Dragon having officially started in April, her comment would equate the cast and crew now being past the halfway point, with bulk photography to span a few months.
Production timeline and updates about House of the Dragon
Production on House of the Dragon Season 3 began on March 21, 2025, at Leavesden Studios in Watford, UK—the central hub for the series. The filming schedule has been designed to span several months, combining extensive studio work with on-location shoots.
Olivia Cooke says that the shooting will be wrapped up in October 2025, which means that the cast and crew are working intensively and taking a break within their scheduled time limit. There had been a guarantee that huge amounts of outdoor shooting in Wales had been accomplished before this, and a lot of present production is already occurring within purpose-built studio settings.
The method is analogous to the production techniques of earlier seasons, where battles of epic scale, noble character moments, and lavishly detailed world-building were filmed on outdoor stages and location-based in the studio. House of the Dragon Season 3 is shaping up to be one of the show’s most logistically challenging productions yet.
Scale of production
According to Polygon.com, House of the Dragon Season 3 has already been characterized by showrunner Ryan Condal as "goddamn massive," which is a sign of the grand story size on TV. As per Polygon.com, he also said,
"Every day I walk around there and look at the things that we're building and the things that we're doing and the number of costumes and extras and all that... I knew it was bigger than season 2, but I don't think I realized quite how much."
The series has been described as bigger in scope than Season 2, with large sets, lavish costume design, and loads of extras for wide-angle battle scenes. All this emphasis on scale is hand-in-hand with the requirements of George R. R. Martin's source material, Fire & Blood, which recounts the Targaryen civil war called the Dance of the Dragons.
Season 3 blends sweeping battle sequences with more intimate, character-driven episodes. According to Screenrant, one of the standout installments will be a “conceptual” episode written by Sara Hess, which departs from the show’s usual structure. This suggests that Season 3 isn’t just aiming for bigger spectacle, but also experimenting with new storytelling styles.
These are the points that indicate that House of the Dragon Season 3 is not about further spectacle but about diversifying how the story is presented.
Release timeline and future of the series
While Olivia Cooke's quote lets us know when they will be finishing up shooting, it does not specify when Season 3 will come out. Taking into consideration production schedules and standard post-production timelines, most filming experts conclude that House of the Dragon Season 3 will release in the summer of 2026. That is in line with past practice, where they waited a year from the time they were actually shooting to finish editing, visual effects, and other post-production.
Looking forward to Season 3, already. Season four has been said to be where House of the Dragon concludes. Showrunner Ryan Condal and writer George R. R. Martin both provided comments on how hard it was to translate Fire & Blood to television, Condal admitting to balancing between fidelity to the source material and conforming to television storytelling.
This makes Season 3 a transition season leading up to the final season of the series in Season 4.
Creative strategy and adaptation issues
House of the Dragon Season 3 filming hasn't been without strife. Condal confirmed there were moments when he and Martin disagreed on certain concepts in certain areas of the story, especially considering that the book is full of heavy and sometimes conflicting historical documents. As per Variety, Condal said,
"I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time. But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. "
He added,
"And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.”
These are some of the dilemmas of modeling something after something else, though, and one of the main reasons the show's interpretation holds up.
The new season is going to be expected to hold some of the greatest shocks of the Targaryen civil war, so it has a lot of careful writing and production work.
Olivia Cooke's confirmation of the shooting schedule confirms the show is in one of its most critical development stages. Production will conclude in October 2025, at which point House of the Dragon Season 3 will be ready to enter the long post-production period, in which so much of the visual spectacle will be organised and completed.
In short, Olivia Cooke confirmed that filming on House of the Dragon Season 3 is set to wrap in October 2025, following its March kickoff earlier this year. The season is shaping up to be the show’s most ambitious yet, combining massive battle sequences with more intimate, character-driven storytelling. While HBO has not officially announced a release date, the series is expected to premiere in summer 2026, in line with the timeline of previous seasons.
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The show is also set to continue on to Season 4, so this season is a turning point in guiding the show towards its end. With production basically half completed and wrapping up in a few months, House of the Dragon just keeps chugging along on its production wheel. Olivia Cooke's story offers an unmistakable benchmark for viewers and addresses the scale and size of what is yet to transpire in the upcoming episode of the Game of Thrones prequel.
Also read: House of the Dragon star Matt Smith gives an exciting new filming update, details revealed
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