Heavy is the head that wears the crown. We’ve finally made it: this weekend, HBO will premiere its highly-anticipated Game of Thrones successor series House of the Dragon. The network entertained many spinoff ideas before landing on House of the Dragon, which will depict a Targaryen civil war fought over a century before the events of the original series. Will House of the Dragon be amazing? The “next Game of Thrones“? Or will it be thrown down as a usurper?
There’s more riding on that question than you might think. HBO has made no secret of wanting to expand the world created by George R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire novels into a proper cinematic universe. Whether that happens may depend on House of the Dragon. “It’s a big responsibility to take on,” showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal told The Hollywood Reporter. “Because I feel like the success of this show will dictate how deep the exploration of this universe goes. I think there’s a lot of interest in seeing other corners of this world I think all that will rely heavily on House of the Dragon doing what it needs to do commercially for HBO.”
House of the Dragon isn’t trying to launch the “Westeros universe”…but it kind of is anyway
Ever since the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, studios have clamored to build their own interconnected universes of shows and movies. Netflix has been pretty transparent about this, claiming everything from Squid Game to The Witcher to The Gray Man were launching cinematic universes.
Warner Bros. Discovery, on the other hand, has focused mainly on DC Comics and Game of Thrones. “As a fan, I think the universe is just as rich as the Marvel universe or the Star Wars universe, I think there are plenty of stories left to tell,” said Condal. “But we’re at the very beginning, whereas Marvel and Star Wars have decades of content and characters built up over time. It’s our job to establish that interest and explore the world a little bit more and get people intrigued to ask, ‘Where else can you go with within this world?’”
That said, House of the Dragon isn’t some show that exists just to set up other shows. “We weren’t consciously trying to launch the new Westeros universe, we didn’t seed anything in this show for other series,” said House of the Dragon executive producer Sara Hess.
Ultimately, House of the Dragon will need to stand on its own two feet.
How successful does House of the Dragon need to be to be considered a “success”?
Not even Condal himself knows “exactly what metrics” HBO will be using to determine whether House of the Dragon is a success. When the first episode of Game of Thrones premiered in 2011, it was watched by 2.2 million viewers; by the time of the season 8 finale, those numbers had risen to around 20 million viewers.
THR reports that expectations on House of the Dragon are likely somewhere in the middle, but when you factor in streaming it becomes much harder to calculate; HBO Max wasn’t even a thing when Game of Thrones wrapped up in 2019. HBO will know how many people watch the show using that service, but we won’t, not unless they tell us. Condal speculated that HBO may use “viewership plus Netflix-style measurements like minutes watched.”
The question of metrics is even more unclear because of the recent shake-ups at HBO’s parent company Warner Media, which was bought by Discovery last year. In the past few months we’ve seen tons of content removed from the HBO Max streaming service, as well as the shelving of high-profile projects like Batgirl (which had already been filmed for around $90 million). As of this writing, House of the Dragon has not yet been renewed for a second season, though HBO and HBO Max programming president Casey Bloys stated a while back that he thought it had “a pretty good shot” at returning.
For Condal’s part, it sounds like he’s made his peace with the fact that the show’s success is largely beyond his control at this point. He, his co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik, and the rest of the cast and crew have made the best show they could. Now it’s up the viewers.
"Miguel Sapochnik and I talked about this from the beginning. We said we can’t make this show defensively, we can’t be guessing what the studio wants us to be or what fans might want in three years time. Things at HBO, at Warner, at Discovery have been changing so fast, we can only hold on to our idea. We have a creative vision and we’re going to execute it. This is a new show set in Westeros, but that has to stand on its own merits. Then, we’ll see what happens."
House of the Dragon premieres Sunday, August 21 on HBO and HBO Max.
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