'Game Of Thrones' is opening a load of murderously bleak tourist attractions

Disneyworld is nice, isn’t it? It’s a nice place filled with nice things. Nice people go there for a nice time. It’s filled with nice characters from nice films being nice. Lovely castles. Great spot for photos.

Perhaps slightly less nice is Westeros from Game Of Thrones. That’s a savage place filled with sex-killers, head-ripper-offers and eye-thumb-inners. Hideous people live there having violent times. It’s filled with death, disease, anger, loss and monsters, and lots of death: sudden death, inevitable death, violent death, inescapable death, death, DEATH. Lovely castles. Great spot for photos.

All in all then, they’re kind of the same. Good news, as after the show ends, HBO is planning to make some of Game Of Thrones’ filming locations into tourist attractions. 

There are already a lot of unofficial Game Of Thrones tours you can go on around Northern Ireland (where a lot of the show is filmed, both in studios in the city’s Titanic Quarter and on dramatic-looking cliff locations) and Dubrovnik (which doubles as King’s Landing), but this would be a step beyond that. The new project will leave the standing sets intact and incorporating Linen Mill Studios, which will be partly converted from a working studio into a huge exhibit of GOT relics, props and equipment. Wanna see Ned Stark’s severed head on a spike? The Viper’s smashed-up head on the ground? Ser Meryn Trant’s sliced-up head? Heads aplenty, probably!

Hodor’s prosthetic penis in a glass case? Replicas of Theon’s severed penis for sale from the gift shop? 

“HBO is thrilled to celebrate the work of the Game of Thrones creative team and crew by preserving these locations and inviting fans to visit Northern Ireland and explore Westeros in person,” Jeff Peters, HBO’s VP of licensing and retail, told Variety. “The opportunity to celebrate Northern Ireland’s pivotal role in the life and legacy of the show and share its culture, beauty and warmth is also a huge inspiration behind these Legacy projects.” Previous Legacy projects have included touring exhibitions and live concerts. 

Will they go all-out on it? Like, a high point of visiting Disneyworld is the daily parade, featuring actors dressed as some of the most iconic characters. Will the Game Of Thrones tour involve loads of Northern Irish students in wigs recreating iconic scenes of incest and dismemberment on carnival floats? 

Or, in a worst case scenario that doubles as an HBO cross-promotional dream, what if they used animatronic figures that, in a Westworld-style twist, came to life? Westerosworld. A murderous nightmare, but one that would shift Blu-Rays like nothing on earth. 

(Pics: Helen Sloan/HBO)