D. B. Weiss

Daniel Brett Weiss (; born April 23, 1971) is an American screenwriter and television producer. Along with his collaborator David Benioff, he is best known for co-creating Game of Thrones (2011–2019), the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of books, A Song of Ice and Fire. He also wrote and produced the 2022 American teen comedy-drama Metal Lords.

Early life Weiss was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His family is Jewish, with ancestral roots in Germany. He graduated from Wesleyan University. He earned a Master of Philosophy in Irish literature from Trinity College Dublin, where he wrote his thesis, "Understanding the (Net) Wake." It explores James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. Weiss later earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Career Weiss worked as personal assistant on films such as The Viking Sagas for New Line Cinema. For a brief period, he also worked as a personal assistant for musician Glenn Frey. It was not used.

Weiss's 2003 debut novel, Lucky Wander Boy, is themed around video games. In 2006, he said he had written a second novel that "needs a second draft". The same year, Weiss completed a screenplay for a film adaptation of the video game series Halo, based on a script by Alex Garland. Director Neill Blomkamp declared the project dead in late 2007.

Weiss also worked on a script for a prequel to I Am Legend, but in May 2011, director Francis Lawrence said that he did not think the prequel would ever happen.

Weiss collaborated with Benioff on the HBO television series Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin's book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Benioff and Weiss also directed three episodes together. For the first two, they flipped a coin to decide who would get the credit on the show. Weiss received directing credit for "Two Swords", Season 4 episode 1, while Benioff was credited for "Walk of Punishment", Season 3 episode 3. In January 2020, HBO President Casey Bloys confirmed that the project had been officially canceled.

On February 6, 2018, Disney announced that Weiss and Benioff would write and produce a new series of Star Wars films after the last season of Game of Thrones ended in 2019. Toward the end of the last season, a petition to HBO was started on Change.org. It described showrunners Benioff and Weiss as "woefully incompetent writers" and demanded "competent writers" to remake the eighth season of Game of Thrones in a manner "that makes sense". The petition eventually amassed over 1. 5 million signatures. In the Chicago Sun Times, Richard Roeper wrote that the backlash to the eighth season was so great that he doubted he had "ever seen the level of fan (and to a lesser degree, critical) vitriol leveled at" Game of Thrones.

In early 2019, Weiss and Benioff entered into an exclusive $200 million deal with Netflix to produce several films and television shows exclusively for it. In late October 2019, it was reported that Weiss and Benioff had exited their deal with Disney due to their commitments to Netflix.

Weiss and Benioff's first project on Netflix was as directors of Leslie Jones's stand-up comedy special Time Machine.

In September 2020, it was announced that Weiss, Benioff and Alexander Woo would write and executive produce the Netflix series 3 Body Problem, based on the similarly named Chinese novel series.

Personal life Weiss and his wife, Andrea Troyer, have two children.