“Dragon Housedrew 9.3 million viewers after its Season 1 finale aired on Sunday, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. This includes both linear viewers who picked up the episode during its four airings on HBOthe cable channel of and HBO Max sinks into the night.
This makes episode 10, titled “The Black Queen”, HBO’s most-watched series finale since the previous series.”game of thronesconcluded its eighth and final season with 19.8 million viewers in 2019. However, “House of the Dragon” was unable to beat its own run of 10.2 million viewers with Episode 2. .
WBD has only released total viewership for the “Game of Thrones” prequel series twice before. The company grossed 9.99 million viewers after the series premiered its first episode in August, making it the most-watched HBO series premiere of all time, before episode 2 moved up 2 %. WBD declined to share exact numbers for episodes 3 through 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 3.2 million for episode 1 and 3.5 million for episode 2) and continued to hover around 2.5 million before dropping slightly again with 2.4 million viewers for episode 8 and 2.2 million for episode 9.
Without giving an exact viewership count, WBD exclusively confirmed Variety that global audience, including cable and streaming increased by 5% with episode 4by 3% with episode 5 and by another 3% with episode 6. (The company declined to share viewership information for Episodes 7-9.)
Other data available on the performance of “House of the Dragon” on HBO Max comes from Nielsen’s weekly streaming charts. These numbers indicate a series’ combined performance during a Monday-Sunday viewing period rather than separating by episode, so the first Nielsen report mentioning “House of the Dragon” only includes the earliest hours of availability. Episode 1, while next week’s report includes a full week of viewing for Episode 1 plus a few hours of Episode 2, and so on. Additionally, the ratings are released a month late, meaning the most recent report only includes the first six episodes of “House of the Dragon.”
That said, Nielsen’s HBO Max streaming report of the series showed 327 million minutes viewed in week one, 741 million minutes viewed in week two, 781 million minutes viewed in week three, 1.02 billion minutes viewed the fourth week, 960 million minutes viewed 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 nearly 10 million viewers of the ‘House of the Dragon’ premiere far surpassed the series premiere.” Game of Thrones” in 2011, the latter having been seen by only 4.2 million. Comparing the Season 1 finales of the two shows, ‘House of the Dragon’ wins again – ‘Game of Thrones’ wrapped up its first install with 3.9 million viewers.
“House of the Dragon” is based on the 2018 novel “Fire & Blood” by George RR Martin. 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 are all executive producers alongside Sara Hess, Jocelyn Diaz, Vince Gerardis and Ron Schmidt.
“We are thrilled to see ‘House of the Dragon’ catch fire with ‘Game of Thrones’ fans around the world, as well as new viewers experiencing the world of Westeros for the first time,” said Casey Bloys, President. . and CEO of HBO and HBO Max. “Congratulations to George, Ryan, Miguel and the entire ‘House of the Dragon’ team on an incredible first season.”