The dragons are coming. Set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon will make its violent debut later this month on Sky Atlantic, Sky-owned streamer Now and the platforms of its paymasters, Warner Bros Discovery’s HBO and HBO Max.
I have mixed feelings about the prospect. Despite ample alternatives, HBO has opted to centre this first attempt at a Thrones spin-off around what was, for me, the least appealing aspect of its prized fantasy series: dictatorial blondes with a dull penchant for winged CGI creatures.
More promisingly, the new 10-part show stars Paddy Considine and Matt Smith, two actors worth watching no matter how stupid their wigs, and Smith has already livened up the advance publicity considerably by suggesting House of the Dragon contains “slightly too much” sex.
An almighty marketing campaign is now flapping into view amid HBO’s and Sky’s separate bids to persuade Game of Thrones viewers to succumb to a prequel about a Targaryen civil war. Outside the diehard fan base, some resistance is to be expected.
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It is more than three years since the underwhelming final episode of Game of Thrones aired in a pandemic-innocent world in which underwhelming final episodes of television shows could occupy the news cycle for days.
Perhaps more pertinently, it is 11 years since its first season established a genuinely epic sense of foreboding before the opening credits. This was easier to do in 2011, when genuinely epic senses of foreboding were only on the news every second night, leaving viewers with enough emotional bandwidth to enjoy Sean Bean being pensive about the onset of winter.
But time is enough to break some spells, and critics have had revisionist fun feasting on the legacy of Thrones, wondering if it was just black magic that convinced the millions it was actually good. These are not ideal conditions for franchise-building.
Nor will it help that there have been almost as many ultimate bosses of HBO of late as there has been occupants of the Iron Throne.
The newest supremo is David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, the company formed this April from the completed merger of factual television conglomerate Discovery and WarnerMedia, the unit of US telecoms giant AT&T that had housed HBO and various Warner Bros studios since just 2018.
Zaslav, the long-time Discovery boss, “spearheaded” the transaction, as his online corporate bio puts it, and is the man juggling its now remarkably eclectic range of media assets. Controversially, he has dropped quite a few of his balls with unceremonious haste.
In its first quarter in existence Warner Bros Discovery took a writedown of $825 million on content following a “global strategic review”, it disclosed in a regulatory filing last week. And that figure is unlikely to include the cost of the near-completed Scoob!: Holiday Haunt or the $90 million DC Comics film Batgirl.
Their sacrificing on the alleged altar of tax efficiency has sent a chill throughout Hollywood, an industry familiar with the brutality of accountants, and left a phalanx of creative luminaries wondering just how late in the process the rug they’re standing on can be pulled out from under them in this new reign.
Fear abounds that these shark-loving Discovery people are about to come in and breathe fire all over HBO, long a byword for TV quality. One reassuring sign that they won’t is that Casey Bloys, in charge of HBO programming since 2016, survived the post-merger executive cull and has since extended his contract. It was Bloys who greenlit House of the Dragon, which was mostly filmed at Warner Bros’ Leavesden Studios near London, and Bloys who killed Bloodmoon, a planned spin-off that shot a $30 million pilot (a third of a Batgirl) at the former home of Game of Thrones, Belfast’s Titanic Studios, before being rejected for not being recognisably Thrones-ish enough.
House of Dragon’s budget of under $20 million per episode — as reported by Variety, in a phrasing that suggests it is not that much under $20 million — is only the beginning of why Warner Bros Discovery needs it to succeed. The company’s chances in the streaming wars ride on it, too.
Combined, HBO Max, HBO and Discovery Plus have 92 million subscribers, with HBO and HBO Max accounting for the majority, and Zaslav has confirmed his intention to bring HBO Max and Discovery Plus together into a single streaming platform in 2023, though owing to its ongoing — and likely last — content supply deal with Comcast-owned Sky in several European markets including Ireland, the unnamed streamer won’t be available to Irish subscribers until at least late 2024.
Its ambitions might be Targaryen-like, but for now, Warner Bros Discovery remains a distant third in the subscriber race to Netflix (221 million) and Disney (206 million, including Hulu and ESPN Plus), and a distant fourth if the 200 million-plus people who stream content on Prime Video — most usually bought as part of Amazon’s Prime delivery service — are included.
Prime Video, of course, has dragon-adjacent fantasies of its own, with its eight-part first season of the mega-budget The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power landing less than a fortnight after House of the Dragon. Exactly how much sex is in it — none, some, a weirdly un-Tolkienesque amount — remains unknown.
These two shows are front-runners in an extremely large pack. Research by Disney-owned US network FX put the scripted series count for 2011, the year of Thrones’ arrival, at 266. Last year, this total hit a record 559, while the first-half tally of 357 puts 2022 on track to break that record again.
For FX boss John Landgraf, who coined the phrase “peak TV” and previously predicted the market would top out in 2018 or 2019, this year will “end up maybe being the absolute peak”. Most of the major streaming services have now made their market landgrabs, while the last of the post-Covid production catch-up will soon fade out.
So “peak TV” is almost certainly here, the implication being that all the studio space under development in Ireland and elsewhere will have missed it. Landgraf doesn’t envisage “any kind of precipitous drop”. Still, here be dragons.
