Showrunners For HBO’s ‘Westworld’ Have A 5+ Season Plan

New HBO show Westworld premieres in October, and showrunners Jonathan and Lisa Joy Nolan have a five-year plan at least for the series.

HBO’S WESTWORLD GEARED UP FOR FIVE SEASON ARC

Westworld, which many expect to become the next Game of Thrones for HBO, is a complex show, whose creators’ priorities are not just to air the first 10-episode season, but to create an arc to last the show at least five seasons.

The Nolans acknowledge their plan is ambitious, but they don’t “want to have a story that repeated itself. We wanted a big story,” says Jonathan. “We wanted the story of the origin of a new species and how that would play out in its complexity.”

The show, starring James Marsden and backed by executive producer J.J. Abrams, is based on the 1973 Michael Crichton film of the same name. The drama is described as “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” The series takes place within a futuristic dystopian amusement park of sorts. Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood co-star.

The Nolans joke in their comparison to Game of Thrones, they “don’t have George [R.R. Martin], we don’t have the novels… We have to write the ‘novels’ first, and then adapt them and then go shoot them.”

“It’s a really complex interlocking story,” Lisa Joy told EW when asked about the show’s production delays. “We knew where we wanted to go and we knew exactly how the season ended where the kind of character arcs ended, but weaving those scripts and writing the dialogue for all these brilliant actors, it takes time.”

Marsden assures that production of the show was extremely difficult but for all the right reasons. “The greatest work never comes easy and, in my opinion, that’s what we were dealing with,” he says. “This show is very ambitious and grand in scale and in themes and very expensive with a giant cast. And bigger than all of that is what this show wants to say.”

The new series premieres on HBO on Oct. 2 at 9 pm. Check out the trailer below.