Why Mass Effect Should Be the Next Game of Thrones

(keyboard typing) Hi, I'm Michael. This is Lessons from the Screenplay. 10 years ago, Game of Thrones premiered on HBO and went on to become television's must-watch series.

In the show's final seasons, every episode was a major cultural event. Millions of dedicated fans tuned in, reacted online, made predictions about the fate of their favorite characters and obsessed over the rich history and lore of the storyworld.

And while the show's disappointing conclusion tarnished it for many fans, the series as a whole was an unmitigated success.

Ever since, discovering the next Game of Thrones has been the Holy Grail of television. What intellectual property, what idea or premise has the potential to resonate on such a massive scale and become the next must-watch TV phenomenon.

All of this was on my mind while standing in line at a coffee shop a few years ago when I casually ran an idea by my writing partner, Alex Calleros, who you might know from our podcast Beyond the Screenplay.

Alex and I have been making movies together ever since film school. The idea was this, what if our favorite video game trilogy of all time, Mass Effect, was a Game of Thrones-style TV show.

It began as a simple thought experiment, but the more Alex and I talked about it, the more we realized that the science fiction epic could make for an incredible series.

So between creating videos for Lessons from the Screenplay and Story Mode and working on an original feature film script, we started developing a long-form adaptation of Mass Effect.

Before long we'd outlined a pilot episode along with the character arts for the first season. We kept going. We broke down the major turning points in each game of the trilogy and mapped the full story across five seasons.

We did a deep dive into the lore of Mass Effect to imagine the rich and fascinating storyworld a long-form television series could explore.

And then, this happened. Henry Cavill, most famous for his roles as gamer and PC builder, teased a secret project on Instagram sparking rumors that he'd been cast in a movie adaptation of Mass Effect.

The news wasn't particularly surprising. Legendary Pictures acquired the film rights way back in 2010, but the rumors of a Mass Effect movie were disappointing because we think trying to cram all the depth and richness of the Mass Effect games into a single film or even a series of films is a huge missed opportunity.