The premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon pulled in a record-setting audience on Sunday.
The Game of Thrones prequel, which is set about 200 years before the previous series and focuses on the Targaryen family, drew nearly 10 million viewers across all platforms in the United States, HBO says. That’s the biggest series premiere in HBO’s history.
The premiere also was the best series launch to date on HBO Max in the United States, Latin America and the so-called EMEA region — Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (Per usual, streaming figures aren’t broken out.)
“It was wonderful to see millions of Game of Thrones fans return with us to Westeros last night,” HBO and HBO Max chief content officer Casey Bloys said in a statement. House of the Dragon features an incredibly talented cast and crew who poured their heart and soul into the production, and we’re ecstatic with viewers’ positive response. We look forward to sharing with audiences what else George [R.R. Martin], Ryan [Condal] and Miguel [Sapochnik] have in store for them this season.”
The House of the Dragon also brought in the largest single-night audience for HBO since the series finale of its parent show drew 19.3 million viewers in May 2019. The best single-night tally since then was season two finale of Euphoria in February, which had 6.6 million cross-platform viewers.
House of the Dragon also eclipsed the audience for the series debut of Game of Thrones (2.22 million same-day viewers, according to Nielsen) in 2011 — though it’s nearly impossible to make a completely like-to-like comparison to the two shows. HBO had a much more limited streaming presence in 2011 and didn’t even regularly report multi-platform viewing at the time. And, of course, Game of Thrones was new to TV viewers then, whereas House of the Dragon gets to stand on the massively successful shoulders of its predecessor.
Full weekend ratings, including a better read of House of the Dragon’s on-air audience vs. those who watched on streaming, will be available Tuesday morning.