House of the Dragon has “positively impacted” HBO Max

Now that the first season is a couple weeks behind us, we can definitively say that House of the Dragon is a hit. It averaged around 29 million viewers per episode, which is approaching what mother show Game of Thrones was pulling in its penultimate season (although it’s still well short of what Thrones posted for its block-busting final season).

The audience for House of the Dragon is split roughly equally between men and women. It skews younger (relatively speaking, anyway), has generated a ton of buzz on social media, and has driven new subscribers to HBO Max. “I can’t overstate how important it is to have a giant tentpole like this,” HBO executive Casey Bloys told Vulture. “Because it not only brings a lot of people in, those people then watch a lot of other things, and not just other HBO shows but library shows like Friends or Big Bang Theory and the Warner Bros. movie library. We’re trying to make people addicts, who love our product and can’t get enough of it…Basically any metric you look at has been very positively impacted.”

House of the Dragon had lots of advantages coming in. Despite a very silly narrative about the final season of Game of Thrones having spoiled people’s appetites for all things Westeros, Bloys could look at the HBO Max streaming figures, see how popular the show still was, and know that people would at least tune in for the premiere of the prequel. “There was never any kind of discernible sort of sign that fans around the world were tired of this story,” he said.

Still, to keep viewers after the first couple episodes, House of the Dragon would need more than just name recognition; it would have to stand on its own. And that was a tall order for HBO; before they started exploring the possibility of a Game of Thrones follow-up show in 2016, HBO had never done a sequel or prequel to any of their hit shows, so this was new territory they explored with a lot of caution. “We didn’t go in with a foregone conclusion that we were going to do [a new series],” Bloys said. “We had to find material that we thought was worth it.”

Why House of the Dragon wasn’t an HBO Max exclusive

The careful buildup paid off. HBO famously made a pilot for an entirely different Game of Thrones show called Bloodmoon but scrapped it after deciding it wasn’t good enough. It also resisted calls to make House of the Dragon an HBO Max exclusive, instead airing it over HBO like normal in addition to streaming it on the Warner Bros. Discovery streaming network.

This had a few benefits. First, about 30 percent of viewing comes from cable, so you don’t wanna give that up. Second, by releasing new episodes every Sunday at 9:00 p.m. EST, HBO successfully turned House of the Dragon into appointment viewing; a lot of people who were streaming the show did so at the same time as those watching it over cable, creating the kind of buzz-heavy watch-along atmosphere that Game of Thrones enjoyed.

And third, keeping House of the Dragon on cable in addition to streaming just felt right, and honored those viewers who wanted to watch it linearly. “Game of Thrones is so iconic in the HBO library that I don’t think [making it HBO Max exclusive] would make sense,” Bloys said.

Did House of the Dragon screw over The Rings of Power on purpose?

The next question facing Bloys and company was when to premiere this thing. “Wherever you go throughout the calendar year, there’s always something that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “There’s no time where it’s easy sailing; you always have to work for it.”

House of the Dragon season 1 ended up premiering on August 21, 2022, which meant that it played opposite Amazon’s new fantasy show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I can’t be the only person to wonder if HBO didn’t choose this date hoping to eat Amazon’s lunch, but Bloys says that wasn’t on their minds. “Having done a show like this in Game of Thrones, we had a pretty good idea of how long it was going to take, and that August airdate was the soonest we believed we could get it on the air,” he said. “And we just wanted to get it on the platform as soon as possible, since there was no real reason to hold it … You want to get your stuff out there.”

"[The Rings of Power] wasn’t anything that we seriously thought about, like, ‘Should we move it?’ You can be aware of what you’re going up against, but I don’t think that you can be afraid."

And that brings us up to now, when House of the Dragon season 1 is in the rearview mirror and season 2 is in the works. “My No. 1 feeling is relief,” Bloys said while thanking “everybody involved” in the making and marketing of the show. “It was a phenomenal success by any metric you look at. Fans came, watched, discussed, and enjoyed.”

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