Movieversalfilm Exclusive · Northern Ireland Screen funding records · Monday 9 November 2026
HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms received £2.1 million from Northern Ireland Screen for its second season, the biggest single production award the agency made in 2025-26. The figure is in Northern Ireland Screen’s published list of Screen Fund decisions for the year, filed under the show’s working title, Sweetfoot. We could find no previous report of it.
What We Found
- Season two: £2,100,000 to Spring Rains Productions, listed as “Sweetfoot Series 2” in the 2025-26 Screen Fund production awards
- Season one: £3,000,000 to Spring Rains Productions, listed by name as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in the 2023-24 awards
- Two seasons combined: £5.1 million from the Screen Fund
- UK availability: Season one launched on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 19 January 2026. HBO says season two debuts in 2027; UK date not yet confirmed
Both awards went to the same company, Spring Rains Productions. Northern Ireland Screen’s annual report for 2025-26 joins the dots: it says the second series of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms took on four of the original “Sweetfoot Academy” trainees, and it names the show and ITV’s First Woman as the two large-scale projects secured that year. Those are the only two titles in the large-scale section of the 2025-26 funding list.
Less than season one, but still the top award
The season two award is £900,000 less than the £3 million given for season one. It still makes up about a sixth of the £12,954,429 the Screen Fund committed to production in 2025-26.
Season one followed Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his young squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), roughly a century before Game of Thrones. Northern Ireland Screen’s annual report says it “was met with great acclaim from both fans and critics”. Speaking to BBC News NI in January, the agency’s head, Richard Williams, called HBO “our biggest ever customer”.
First Woman: £1.2m for ITV’s moon thriller
The second-biggest award went to ITV’s First Woman: £1.1 million in production funding to Mammoth Screen, plus £100,000 in development funding. The six-part lunar thriller stars Andrea Riseborough as Claire Reith, the first woman to set foot on the moon, and Ashley Walters as her husband Ben, who tries to find out why she has vanished. Walters made his feature directing debut this year with Animol.
Filming got under way in Belfast in spring 2026, and the lunar landscape and moonbase were created at Studio Ulster’s virtual production stages. It has been commissioned for ITV1, STV, ITVX and STV Player; UK date not yet confirmed.
Blue Lights tops the TV drama list
Among the returning dramas, Blue Lights series four received the most: £705,705 to Two Cities Television. That is a little less than the £734,205 for series three in 2024-25, and more than the £650,000 for series two in 2023-24.
Line of Duty series seven, from World Productions, received £600,000. World Productions has also, as we reported last month, bid to make Doctor Who. Dalgliesh series four (New Pictures) and Ecosse Films’ new Monarch of the Glen, a reboot for 5 and PBS Masterpiece made in Scotland and Northern Ireland, got £600,000 each. Black Dog Television’s Art Detective series two received £650,000, Jimmy McGovern’s Time series three from BBC Studios £500,000, and Paramount’s MobLand series two £68,790.
A bigger year overall
By our count of the three published lists, production awards totalled £12,954,429 in 2025-26. That is up about 40% on £9,221,979 in 2024-25 and slightly above £12,425,319 in 2023-24. The 2024-25 list had a single large-scale award, £1.65 million for The Death of Robin Hood.
The annual report also records two big films that got away. It says the How to Train Your Dragon sequel “has been taken to London” to use Universal’s own stages at Sky Elstree, and that Legendary’s Gundam, which was due to start preparing in Belfast, would be made in Australia instead.
- Checked: Northern Ireland Screen funding decisions for 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26, and its 2025-26 annual report, on 9 November 2026
- What the figures are: Funding decisions as listed by Northern Ireland Screen, not total production budgets
Movieversalfilm Takeaway
Westeros is still the biggest ticket in Northern Ireland. In a year when the agency’s own report lists two big films lost to other studios, Dunk and Egg alone took about a sixth of the production pot, and the moon thriller First Woman took the rest of the large-scale money. Add Blue Lights, Line of Duty and Time, and a good share of the next wave of big British TV has Northern Ireland Screen’s backing.
Are you more excited for season two of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms or ITV’s First Woman? Tell us below.