Andy Weir Trashes Game of Thrones Finale in Reddit AMA, Pitches Breaking Bad and Dexter Rewrites
Andy Weir, the bestselling author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, used a Reddit AMA on r/IAmA under his longtime username u/sephalon to take direct aim at three of the most controversial endings in modern television. When user u/homerj35 asked, “Hi Andy! If you could rewrite the ending to any book/movie which book/movie would you choose?”, Weir went off-script.
“Can I pick TV shows instead? I’m going to say yes,” Weir wrote. “I would rewrite the entire final season of ‘Gam of Thrones.’ That’s a given.”
That was the opener. Weir then pitched alternate endings for Breaking Bad and Dexter, with a twist nobody saw coming.
“But more importantly: I would have changed the ending of ‘Breaking Bad’ to have Walter get away, and I would have changed the end of ‘Dexter’ to reveal that Dexter,” Weir continued, with the punchline being that Dexter tracks Walter down at the logging camp. The two endings stitch into a single crossover that audiences never got and now never will.
The pitch lands for a reason. The actual Game of Thrones finale collapsed under the weight of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss rushing eight seasons of buildup into six episodes. The actual Breaking Bad finale sent Walter White out in a blaze of self-aware nobility that some fans found earned and others found tidy. The actual Dexter finale, which aired in 2013, shipped Dexter Morgan off to a lumberjack life in the Pacific Northwest in a sequence so widely mocked that Showtime eventually commissioned Dexter: New Blood in 2021 to try to scrub the memory.
Weir’s instinct, to give the bad guy his win and let the antihero hunt him down, is the kind of structural fix that Hollywood writers’ rooms have stopped reaching for. It rewards the audience for paying attention across multiple shows. It treats the villain as the engine of the story rather than a sin to be punished. It is what genre writers used to do before prestige TV decided every ending had to be a thesis statement.
In the same AMA, Weir gave a status update on the long-stalled Artemis film adaptation. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller picked up the rights in 2017, hired Tomb Raider and Fallout writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet to script it, and then watched the project sink into development hell after Disney bought Fox.
Weir’s recent assessment is blunt. “I guess it’s probably on the backburner somewhere. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it,” he told Den of Geek. He added, “I know Lord and Miller have some really good ideas for it.” But the directors instead pivoted to Project Hail Mary, which released in 2026 starring Ryan Gosling.
Robertson-Dworet later confirmed the budget killed it. She told JOE that the script was finished and that she was proud of it. “It was an Andy Weir [story]: Artemis... I’m very curious what happens, if anything ever happens with that,” she said. “The lunar gravity was a major stumbling block. Pulling off an entire movie set in 1/6 gravity apparently was not as cheap as we thought it might be when we started writing. But sometimes that’s how it works. You write the script, and then it gets budgeted, and then you’re like: ‘Oh f**k, never mind.’ Then, in the meantime, as the writer, you’re like: ‘Oh, actually I spent a lot of time on that.’”
Lord and Miller have since said they still intend to make the film someday, with Miller telling The Hollywood Reporter: “There is an Artemis script, it’s delightful.” No studio has greenlit production.
The AMA also surfaced Weir’s standard counsel for aspiring writers. His path proves his model. As he told Woman’s World: “I didn’t expect to become this successful. My first book, The Martian, was self-published on Amazon with Kindle Direct Publishing and then it took off and I got a print deal with Penguin Random House. From there, The Martian took off. It got made into a movie. I did another book called Artemis and then came Project Hail Mary.”
The implication for aspiring writers is direct. The Martian started as a serialized free post on Weir’s website, became a 99-cent Kindle release, climbed to a Podium audiobook, drew a Crown print deal, and finished as a Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon. Weir bypassed every gatekeeper in publishing by writing a book readers actually wanted to read. That is the advice underneath the advice.
Weir is one of the few mainstream science fiction authors left whose readership crosses the political aisle. He writes optimistic hard SF with competent protagonists, working science, and earned endings. He does not lecture his audience. He does not punish his heroes for the crime of being heroes. And when he sounds off on a botched finale, the complaint is not aesthetic, it is structural.
The Reddit AMA can be read in full at the link below. The TV-rewrite comment is the most-shared answer, but the writing advice and the Artemis update are the parts that working writers should bookmark.
Source: u/sephalon Reddit AMA, r/IAmA
Whose finale would you rewrite if you had Andy Weir’s pen, and what would you change? Let us know.