“House of the Dragon” brought in 9.3 million viewers after airing its Season 1 finale on Sunday, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. This includes both linear viewers who caught the episode during its four airings on HBO’s cable channel and HBO Max streams through the night.
That makes Episode 10, titled “The Black Queen,” HBO’s most-watched series finale since predecessor series “Game of Thrones” concluded its eighth and final season with 19.8 million viewers in 2019. However, “House of the Dragon” was not able to beat its own series high of 10.2 million viewers with Episode 2.
WBD has only released total viewership numbers for the “Game of Thrones” prequel series twice before this. The company reported 9.99 million viewers after the series debuted its premiere episode in August, making it the most-watched HBO series premiere ever, before Episode 2 crept up by 2%. WBD declined to share exact numbers for Episodes 3-9, though Nielsen’s measurement of the show’s cable viewership, excluding HBO Max, showed a drop after Episode 3 (2.5 million viewers compared to Episode 1’s 3.2 million and Episode 2’s 3.5 million) and continued to hover near 2.5 million before slightly declining again with 2.4 million viewers for Episode 8 and 2.2 million for Episode 9.
Without giving an exact number of viewers, WBD did confirm exclusively to Variety that overall viewership including both cable and streaming rose by 5% with Episode 4, by 3% with Episode 5 and by another 3% with Episode 6. (The company declined to share any information about viewership of episodes 7-9.)
The other available data about the performance of “House of the Dragon” on HBO Max comes from Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings. These numbers point a series’ combined performance during a Monday to Sunday viewing period rather than separating by episode, so the first Nielsen report mentioning “House of the Dragon” includes only the first few hours of availability for Episode 1, while the next week’s report includes a full week of viewership for Episode 1 plus a few hours of Episode 2, and so on. Additionally, the rankings are released with a one-month delay, meaning the most recent report only includes the first six episodes of “House of the Dragon.”
That said, Nielsen’s reporting of HBO Max streaming of the series showed 327 million minutes viewed in the first week, 741 million minutes viewed in second week, 781 million minutes viewed in the third week, 1.02 billion minutes viewed in the fourth week, 960 million minutes viewed in the fifth week and 1.01 billion minutes viewed in the sixth week.
Thanks to years of franchise fandom and arguably HBO’s biggest-ever marketing campaign, the “House of the Dragon” premiere’s nearly 10 million viewers outpaced the 2011 “Game of Thrones” series premiere by a considerable amount, as the latter was viewed by only 4.2 million. Comparing the two shows’ Season 1 finales, “House of the Dragon” wins again — “Game of Thrones” concluded its first installation with 3.9 million viewers.
“House of the Dragon” is based on George R.R. Martin’s 2018 novel “Fire & Blood.” The series is set 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones” and tells the story of House Targaryen. Martin co-created the series with Ryan Condal, who serves as co-showrunner with director Miguel Sapochnik. Martin, Condal and Sapochnik all executive produce alongside Sara Hess, Jocelyn Diaz, Vince Gerardis and Ron Schmidt.
“We’re so thrilled to see ‘House of the Dragon’ catch fire with ‘Game of Thrones’ fans around the world, as well as new viewers who are discovering the world of Westeros for the first time,” said Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max. “Congrats to George, Ryan, Miguel and the whole ‘House of the Dragon’ team on an incredible first season.”
From Variety US