Daily Wire Made a Game of Thrones-Sized Bet With Fantasy Series. Producers Say It Was More Than Worth It.

There was a brief odd boom recently in the media industry where outlets all seemed to be in a race to get into the scripted content game.

Media companies competing with traditional studios to make the next Sopranos or Breaking Bad may seem like an odd proposition, but it has happened. Remember when Fox News teamed up with 24 producer Joel Surnow to make their own Daily Show-type satire? They probably don’t either, but I swear it happened in 2007.

As media companies have moved into streaming content, podcasting, and more, there was a need for content which led to scripted movies from Fox Nation in 2022 and 2023, for instance.

Most companies have set their sights away from scripted material — Fox Nation has found success with docuseries like Martin Scorsese’s The Saints — but Daily Wire is still making the gamble and their latest project marks the biggest investment any media company has made when trying to get into the pop culture zeitgeist.

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is a fantasy series retelling of the Arthurian legend, based on a series of books by Stephen R. Lawhead.

It’s a Game of Thrones-level epic for the company. While the cast doesn’t boast big, recognizable names, it’s a sprawling production that filmed in Hungary, Italy, and Romania. The first season’s budget stands around eight figures, with more than seven figures being pumped into each episode.

The massive undertaking was mostly possible thanks to two people: Jeremy Boreing, the former co-CEO of Daily Wire and a Pendragon writer/producer/director, and Dallas Sonnier, an independent movie producer who has overseen the majority of Daily Wire’s content, everything from Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman to genre-heavy fare like 2022’s Shut In and Terror on the Prairie — movies that marked comebacks for Vincent Gallo and Gina Carano, respectively.

Pendragon Cycle, according to Sonnier, was born out of a unique mix of ambition, opportunism, and passion.

Sonnier had first begun his partnership with Daily Wire when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and he found himself with a movie no studios were making offers to buy: 2020’s Run, Hide, Fight, a Die Hard-style story about a school shooting.

Sonnier explained in an interview with Mediaite:

We were having a lot of success and they wanted to get into series. And so I went and got them two books because I asked around the office because this is the easiest way to get anything greenlit. I said, what are your favorite books? And they said, well, Atlas Shrugged and The Pendragon Cycle. And I said, okay, Atlas Shrugged, I love. What’s The Pendragon Cycle?

The series of books were a longtime favorite of Boreing, the former co-CEO of Daily Wire who ended up being the creative driving force of the show. Boreing left his co-CEO position in March 2025 to focus more on specific creative projects.

“He couldn’t believe it. He had wanted to turn that book into a movie or series since he was in his 20s in Los Angeles as a young man,” Sonnier said about Boreing, who directed multiple episodes of the series.

“I was 21 years old the first time I started writing a screenplay adaptation of The Pendragon Cycle. I didn’t have an option. I didn’t even know what an option was. But I loved the work and believed I could somehow will a film adaptation into existence,” Boreing told Mediaite about his long history with the project.

Boering ended up with ultimate creative control, while Sonnier oversaw various aspects of production.

“We talked a little bit about pulling in sort of a professional showrunner, things like that, but it was just clear to me that Jeremy Boreing was going to be the showrunner/writer/director/creative lead, everything like that. He even gave up his CEO position for a time to go and do all of this,” Sonnier said.

The real question now is whether a massive production like Pendragon Cycle is worth it for a media company catering to their right-leaning crowd. Something like Shut In required only a couple million in investments from the company, making it a little clearer how that investment can be covered through subscribers and other content.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the show does not have a score from critics, but it does have an 85% fresh rating from audience members. Films seen as having strong political allegiances can, however, lead to great disparity between attention from critics versus audiences. The Melania documentary, for instance, sports a near-perfect 98% rating from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, but just 11% approval among critics.

According to Boreing, a second season of Pendragon Cycle has already been written and the show has found an audience (though specific numbers are kept under wraps).

“We’ve already written a first draft of season two, the cast is ready, and there’s an enormous amount of story still to tell,” he said.

Boreing also argued that he’s seen through his work at Daily Wire that film and television projects can be solid drivers when it comes to subscriber numbers. He’s said a majority of subscriber revenue can be attributed to entertainment projects. And as far as media companies dabbling in fictional works, he said it’s not all that new really.

“I think we have a great example in network television which, for over half a century, produced both news and scripted fiction. The same network that gave us Walter Cronkite gave us All In the Family,” he said. “Yes, consumption is becoming more atomized, but people still trust brands. The downside, of course, is that fiction is expensive. The upside is, in my experience, it drives far more subscribers than news alone.”

Sonnier argued that Daily Wire’s movie business is still young enough that there is more to account for than just covering budget.

“They had to show that they could compete with HBO and all these other big Netflix and everything, all these big companies in order to make premium content that an audience would say, wait, that’s on Daily Wire? That’s crazy! It’s unbelievable,” he said.

The hope now with their biggest project, Sonnier said, is that creatives will be more willing to work with a Daily Wire without hangups on the politics of its personalities, including founder Ben Shapiro. Still up on the to-do list is an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which Sonnier promises is coming as the company has already invested in it.

“If you watched it on HBO, you would think HBO made it. That was the goal,” Sonnier said.

He explained:

From a financial perspective, I think it’s going to be more of an investment in the future, right? I mean, that is a huge investment to recoup. I don’t know how the math works, but that seems like a long road. But if they invest in that level of production, if you build it, they will come kind of mentality. All of a sudden now, other creators are gonna see, oh my God, they’re spending real money on their projects. And so The Pendragon Cycle has opened a bunch of doors for creators, filmmakers, writers, directors to be calling us saying, hey, we want to be in business with Daily Wire if they’re doing that. So that that’s really what it is.

Daily Wire’s continued commitment to swimming in the pop culture waters simply boils down to Shapiro and Boreing’s love of movies and a shared disdain for political correctness, according to the producer.

He said:

It’s actually pretty simple. It’s that Jeremy Boreing and Ben Shapiro love movies. I mean, honestly it’s that simple. Like, they are movie obsessed. If you sit down with either one of them, they can talk to you about great Westerns from the ’50s. They can talk you about the ’70s [Francis Ford] Coppola films and early George Lucas. They can talk to you about great ’80s movies. They can talk to you about the Miramax days of the ’90s. They are so steeped in movie lore. And we all share this common belief that movies ended in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected. He killed comedy, he killed rock and roll, he killed fun and joy. And so for me, it’s like, I think we all agree that the answer to making movies great again is to make them like we used to make them before 2008.

Boreing argued that many conservatives openly reject modern pop culture, and proudly so, but it may be a “self-inflicted wound.”

“Conservatives have been beaten up by the culture for so long that some have overcorrected into a rejection of art itself. You’ll sometimes hear people say ‘I don’t even watch movies anymore’ like it’s a badge of honor,” the filmmaker said. “The reality is that it’s closer to a self-inflicted wound. I’m encouraged that an audience showed up for Pendragon. I think that’s the proof of concept we needed — that if you make something genuinely good, something true and beautiful, conservatives will engage with it. Now we have to build on that.”

All episodes of The Pendragon Cycle’s first season are now streaming on Daily Wire+.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!