House of the Dragon has already become a record-breaking series for HBO, as evidenced by premiere numbers that topped the year.
The series, the historically set prequel to Game of Thrones, debuted on August 21 on HBO and streaming service HBO Max. The initial metrics clearly brought welcome news for HBO since the numbers from analytics company Samba TV show that House of the Dragon had the biggest single-day premium cable or streaming viewership premiere of 2022. Reportedly, 2.6 million U.S. households watched the premiere episode, "The Heirs of the Dragon," during its first six hours of availability (from 9 PM/ET to 3 AM/ET) on traditional linear TV viewing and streaming. Thus, the network can gleefully throw shade at streaming giant Netflix since the number is more than double the recent premiere output of Stranger Things Season 4, which earned 1.2 million U.S. household viewers during its first day.
Indicatively, the favorable numbers arrive after reports that House of the Dragon's premiere experienced such a sizable surge in viewership that the HBO Max app crashed for viewers watching on Amazon's Fire TV devices. While a conspiracy-minded individual might attribute such a stoppage to Amazon itself being a direct genre competitor to the series -- with the lavish, exorbitantly budgeted The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power set to make its own grand premiere on the company's native Prime Video platform -- the crash was purportedly only sporadic among users.
Yet, the app crash is also the kind of quasi-controversy that signals unfulfillable demand for the series, which always helps from an (advantageously free) marketing perspective. Indeed, on that front, it was recently revealed that HBO spent a total of $100 million on marketing for House of the Dragon, proving the show's current ephemera-fueled ubiquity as being not quite organic, especially considering that the production budget on the series was only $200 million. Nevertheless, the money was apparently well-spent, judging by the show's impressive premiere numbers.
Amidst the hype, the show's bosses, Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal, are out to prove that it's more than a flash-in-the-pan cash-grab. In fact, Sapochnik recently revealed that the entire arc of the series has already been mapped out, potentially fixing a problem that the show's predecessor series arguably suffered in its later seasons. "We have a very, very precise idea of where we wanna go with it, but we can't tell you," Sapochnik said. "So it's kind of, we're in the middle of a history that is rich and full of stories to tell and it's a good place to start."
Moreover, Condal recently hinted that House of the Dragon's coverage of the dragon-riding royal Targaryen family might not be restricted to the show's current era (some 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones). Consequently, the prequel series could eventually experience a metamorphosis into a Targaryen anthology series. "I think we have a good plan for Season 2, if HBO is willing and eager to continue telling the story with us," Condal said. "There is really 300 years of Targaryen history to explore, and there are many stories within there that are really fascinating."
House of the Dragon premieres new episodes on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
Source: Samba TV