The Dragon Demands

I saw this whole video on...well it was more on why the recent trend towards "Romantasy" is happening, though it then brings up "Cozy Fantasy" as a similar booming genre now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr75Lj_izkg The "Romantasy" boom in things like A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, Outlander TV series, etc. And I realized....House of the Dragon Season ONE is probably the closest we'll get to "Romantasy" for Westeros: a female POV and the main narrative closely follows her various romantic choices. Of course as the video explains, there is a distinction between "Romantasy" and "Fantasy with a prominent Romance storyline in it" - in Romantasy, if you take out the core romance the story would fall apart, it IS the core story, but a Fantasy with Romance storylines in it could survive in some form if you took that Romance out. But after Season 1, beyond that point the story isn't really about romantic choices anymore. And I realized FEW spinoffs ever would be. Even the core ASOIAF only have SOME romance elements in them but not core to the story. Targaryen Conquest through Jaehaerys? Not really romance and certainly not female POV romance. Blackfyre Rebellion? (defined as Conquest of Dorne through Blackfyre Rebellion)....how central was Shiera Seastar? Or Elaena? Robert's Rebellion, if done as a movie? Lyanna isn't really the core POV with narrative agency for most of it. Dunk & Egg...has some romance in it but it's more of the "Cozy Fantasy" subgenre. ...but my point is that this video got me thinking: did HotD Season 1 come at the perfect time, as this is acknowledged to be a booming era for Romantasy in the 2020s?

Do you guys think that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms can ride the recent trend towards the "Cozy Fantasy" subgenre? https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/cozy-fantasy

Aha! HBO Max just publicly confirmed those international expansion leaks I mentioned a few days ago: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hbo-max-international-countries-launches-july-90-markets-1236231624/ Coming up only one month from now in JULY, HBO Max will expand into 12 new markets, across Europe and the CIS: Estonia Latvia Lithuania Iceland Albania Cyprus Malta Georgia Armenia Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan This leaves the only parts of Europe that do NOT have HBO Max as 1 - all of the Sky Atlantic zone (UK, Germany, Italy) 2 - Greece. Seriously, I'm surprised Albania is in this list. According to that website info they were setting up Ukraine tracks as well, we'll see what happens. No word on Mongolia or Uzbekistan; no surprise they don't have Turkmenistan it's the North Korea of central Asia. I'm mildly surprised Azerbaijan isn't in this - they're an oil rich country with a good sized economy, but as a Turkic nation they are not serviced by Arabic language OSN streamer. “These 12 countries will be followed by a few additional markets later this year, and launches in Germany, Italy and the U.K. early next year. Each new market further positions HBO Max as a worldwide destination for the best in entertainment.”

Warner Bros. Discovery officially announces it will split: https://deadline.com/2025/06/warner-bros-discovery-to-split-into-two-companies-1236427927/ This is great news. They've been building up to it for months. Comcast is doing the same thing. They split off their dying cable networks into a separate company, while the movies/games/"DTC" (Director to Consumer, including both HBO subscription cable and HBO Max streamer) will remain. One wrinkle I raised an eyebrow at is that yes, "Discovery" will actually split off from Warner as well - I thought just the cable companies of both would be dropped, but it turns out the Discovery+ streaming platform goes in the deal as well. David Zaslav remains head of Warner (name will change?) while his right hand and CFO Gunnar Wiendenfels will be head of the Discovery+ / combined linear cable channels company. MOST of WBD's remaining $35 Billion in debt (much of it inherited from the Time Warner era of the mid-2010s) will LEAVE, going over to the failing cable network company - leaving HBO Max free of its crippling debt burdens (the kind that lead to DRASTIC EPISODE CUTS in their flagship shows!) Why the heck would Wiedenfels agree to all this? Well he's a product of McKinsey group and a hardcore corporate raider; he'll probably gut and sell off all their assets. WE DO NOT CARE one way or the other - what matters is that "the Westeros franchise on HBO" is now FREE of the cable debt that's been hanging over our heads for a decade. Won't affect us too much - even original content like Adult Swim things (Rick and Morty) they said there will be content-sharing/distribution deals in place - so it appears Adult Swim content will continue to be available on HBO Max. Zaslav also said he will be appearing soon at the high profile Sun Valley media conference in Idaho on June 23rd - the big retreat for all the major media moguls where they tend to make big announcements.

Overviewing other shows briefly: Andor Season 2 is an odd case because structurally it's not really a TV show but a giant miniseries. It's amazing, but it's really four wonderful TV movies, and it was released in 3 episode bursts which complicates the viewership figures. I've seen Star Wars news channels remarking on how this affected the ratings: unlike standard releases where the premiere is usually the highest viewership, it steadily increased one week to the next. This hammered home the point that heavily serialized shows do a LOT better in the post-90 days viewership numbers than the immediate same-night or post-week numbers: people delay watching so they can savor them or have watch parties. This is not a bad thing. According to Luminate, Andor Season 2's first set of episodes got 721 million minutes watched, divided by combined runtime of 148 minutes, the adjusted BMI is about 4.87 million viewers. Which is good, that's roughly how well The Last of Us Season 1 was doing. Relative to the MASSIVE cost of the series ($27 million per episode!)....this is certainly "good"; maybe not "great"; but they're not too worried because the theory is more people will watch in the next 90 days catching up over the summer, because it's so heavily serialized. And of course viewership isn't everything if it's a project making real headway at prestigious awards shows (similarly, viewership at TLOU doesn't concern me much when it's concerned a lock for major awards nominations). And either way there's no Andor Season 3.... But now we turn to sordid matters... The four major epic fantasy series that launched with the Streaming Boom of 2019-2022 were The Witcher, The Wheel of Time, LOTR: Rings of Power, and House of the Dragon. House of the Dragon Season 1's average post-week episode viewership cross-platform was between 9 and 10 million, and Season 2 was typically 8 million and change. Viewership dropped maybe 15%. The calculated average viewership (time watched divided by season duration) for The Witcher: The Witcher Season 1 - 9.0 The Witcher Season 2 - 8.0 The Witcher Season 3 - 4.4 Despite starting roughly at the same level House of the Dragon Season 1 later did, the backlash to Season 2 saw Season 3's viewership drop by half, and the lead actor leave over creative differences. It's done. Well they're filming a fifth and final season now, but I mean it's run its course. Average viewership for LOTR: The Rings of Power Amazon didn't want to give exact figures. What we DO know is that Season 1 had 100 million TOTAL views, which translates into ROUGHLY 10 million "average viewership per episode" post one week. That's pretty good: as we've seen with HotD and Witcher Season 1, anything above 9 million is a big success. But I think a lot of people were just "trying it out"....for Season 2, Amazon was saying that the viewership "surged" to 55 million overall (admittedly it did go up as the season progressed, and it was a better season)....but the reality is that doing the math, the calculated BMI was around 4.5 million average viewers per episode. Reports vary based on what figures you use: some say "over 60% drop", others "40% drop". Nielsen's measurement by households not raw views said Season 1 was watched by 1.8 million USA households, which went down to 0.9 million in Season 2. ...So I think we can broadly say that viewership is "roughly down by half" (maybe 55%, maybe 45%, in that region). I don't have exact figures for the recently cancelled The Wheel of Time series Couldn't find season-scale watch numbers BUT I did find them for the season finales: TWOT Season 1 finale - 638 million minutes TWOT Season 2 finale - 430 million minutes TWOT Season 3 finale - 427 million minutes Doing quick math for JUST the Season 3 finale divided by the runtime of the finale, the calculated BMI was...about 6.3 million views. I don't know if the cost justified that, but A - the ratings were stable since Season 2 and indeed improving slightly, B - ...while we DO have to wade through unreliable numbers....it honestly does seem that their calculated "average viewership per episode" was significantly better than LOTR: The Rings of Power at this point (which is also a lot more expensive). But it appears they never truly recovered from the initially low viewership for Season 1 (they DID level off and slightly improve in Season 3, but they never reached even 8.0 million) What about Amazon's new breakout hit, Fallout? It was their biggest streaming hit ever, surpassing TROP Season 1 (when people were "sampling" it). 2.9 Billion with a B minutes viewed...divided by a combined runtime of 446 minutes....it got a calculated BMI of about 6.5 million average views per episode. That's better than The Last of Us or Andor ever did. A bit behind HotD but not a fair comparison: it was put out in a BINGE release, which is actually HARDER than an episodic release that builds up word of mouth over many weeks. If Season 2 shifts to an episodic release I think it will actually perform much higher than this (difficult to compare). ....who else is left? I think that covers the major franchises for now.... Severance Season 2 = 6.4 Billion with a B minutes viewed, runtime 497 minutes = 12.87 Million Question of course is if HotD Season 3 can rebound due to all the big battles in it, and unlike Season 2 not being produced during an ongoing writers' strike....

I've been crunching the numbers, to make this more presentable... Comparing the Viewership data for House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, Andor, LOTR: Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, Fallout, and the Witcher. I was spurred to do this after seeing the relatively low viewership data for TLOU 2 and Andor Season 2. First, some warnings: This is at best a vague approximation, because the streamers intentionally quote data out of context to put a positive spin on things. The best use of this information is to compare a show's performance relative to itself, not directly to the numbers other shows are getting (you can compare ratios, like "that show lost half its audience in its second season, HotD didn't"). We don't have access to international streaming data for all of these, unless the streamer openly provides the global numbers. Unlike the others, HBO Max still has one foot in cable - roughly a third of the "combined cross platform" viewership is on cable. HOWEVER, this decreases every year (The Last of Us Season 1 surpassed HotD Season 1 for most streaming views but NOT views overall....because it was released a year later, by which time more people had shifted from cable to streaming). Even if they weren't actively trying to put a spin on all of this, there's more than one way to measure "good" viewership: Andor 2 demonstrated very clearly that heavily serialized dramas tend to be watched time-delayed over a 90 day period more than "spectacle" shows that focus on same-night event viewing. The binge model is thankfully fallout out of favor, because it's harder to build up an audience long-term. Only Netflix still regularly does this. Amazon did, however, release Fallout this way - because it's so heavily serialized there were fears it would take too long to get to the good parts (this turned out to be the right choice). First off, what sparked this was the slanted reporting coming out for The Last of Us Season 2: HBO put out a press release saying that the average episode viewership was "37 million up from 32 million last season".....on CLOSER inspection they made an exact words lie, which in and of itself is incriminating: they specifically said "37 million global, compared to 32 USA in season 1"....news sites that aren't run by real journalists of course slurred this to leave out the "global" vs "USA" distinction (which was the plan all along they just played into it). The fact that they're hiding a direct comparison to the Season 2 USA only figures is not a good sign at all. They even tried comparing this to House of the Dragon, citing that the USA numbers were average 29 million for Season 1, 25 million for Season 2 - roughly a 14% decline (not great, not terrible)...but news sites actually few for comparing this against the "37 million GLOBAL" number for The Last of Us Season 2. Admittedly their first season did a little better than HotD Season 1. By comparison, the cross-platform average episode viewership was about 30.7 million for Game of Thrones Season 6. So House of the Dragon Season 1 was slightly behind that, and HotD Season 2 fell a bit to now slightly behind Season 4 levels. The way "average viewership" is calculated is to divide raw time viewed by duration - but keep your units consistent. If you get millions of MINUTES viewed, divided by season runtime in MINUTES, if viewership in hours divide by runtime in hours. This is only a loose approximation but it's the best we can do for comparing streaming TV series. Shifting gears a bit, the combined cross-platform viewership post one week for The Last of Us...the Season 1 premiere was 4.3 million, compared to the 9 million and change of HotD Season 1's premiere. TLOU Season 2 premiere was 5.3 million...and it sank to 3.7 million for the finale; though this number is misleading because viewership is always lower on major holidays and it aired on Memorial Day Weekend. It appears there was no IMMEDIATE correlation to the major character death in episode 2: going by the cable-only same night numbers Nielson gives us for the HBO linear channel, it went from 938 K for episode 2.1, then down to 643K after episode 2.2....but that was probably because it aired Easter Sunday, not the character death in that episode, because episode 2.3 was back up to 768K. By comparison, TLOU Season 1's linear same-night numbers were 588K for the premiere and 1.04 million for the S1 finale...though this doesn't say much given that there's been a full two year gap between seasons and far more people have shifted from cable to streaming since then. Only the combined cross-platform numbers matter and they didn't reveal all of those. Using the Nielsen same-nights relative to itself, the season 2 finale was a 30% drop - but stressing again, the actual drop was probably less than that, viewership is always down on a holiday. The drop from episode 2.1 to 2.3 was more like 20%, and it usually goes down after a premiere high, for all shows. Difference is that House of the Dragon Season 2 improved as Season 2 progressed. Episode 2.1 was 7.8 million cross-platform - down from the 9 to 10 million Season 1 was getting, roughly 16% drop, which tracks with the season average being about 14% lower. But despite ups and downs it held relatively stable; for the big battle in episode 2.4 it went up to 8.1, and everyone tuned it for what they assumed would be a big action finale in episode 2.8 - which got a season high of 8.9 million average viewers in the first week. What can we discern from this? House of the Dragon viewership was "stable", with a slight drop of about 15% from Season 1 - present from the start, so it had more to do with the two year gap than anything else. Other shows had far worse drops.... TLOU post-week viewership was never as high as HotD's post-week viewership, 5+ million compared to 9+ million, BUT on the full post-90 days numbers it ultimately did slightly better, 32 million to season 1's 29 (possibly because of all the people who bought HBO Max in the preceding year because of HotD Season 1...) -- of course they're hard to compare....HotD had a built in fanbase from Game of Thrones...though you could just as easily argue TLOU had a built in fanbase as a famous video game adaptation... (shrug) The average per episode viewership for TLOU Season 2 is so embarrassing that HBO is hiding it by talking about the GLOBAL numbers and hoping no one notices the difference. Could the average viewership be as low as half? I'd hesitate to go that far without evidence. There IS a distinction between post-week and post-month viewing. Last time, TLOU edged out HotD Season 1 in post-90 days viewing, rewatching it, or picking up by word of mouth. What we can glean about the post-week numbers from just the Nielsen cable ratings indicate it was....probably less than a 30% drop, perhaps less than a 20% drop. Nor did people rage-quit the instant that major character death happened. Still...the long-term combination of that character death, combined with an oddly structured and short season without resolution (they're going to shift to Abby next season)...may have hurt their long-term post-90 day viewership numbers (it hasn't been 90 days since the FINALE just since the premiere so we have to wait and see). Overall...at this point HotD is holding up a bit better, though even I admit TLOU Season 2 will do much better at prestigious awards shows this year.

....no? Why do you ask? Oh I'm giving the list of country code abbreviations at that link: "EE" = "Estonia" etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

We just got a decent sized leak for HBO Max expansion: they just updated the source-code and geographic IP address availability for multiple countries, which they usually only do right before a major launch. Before if you tried to access their website from these countries you'd get an error message. They also added corresponding language subtitle tracks to much of their content. Basically...the Australian mirror of their website that recently launched for Australia IP Addresses forgot to hide these extra language subtitle tracks the way they're hidden in the USA. These countries include the Baltics and Iceland...which we already thought were on the verge of a launch because Telia's contract expires in July....but also multiple former CIS countries. This leak comes from the reddit map nerds who liked that comprehensive map I put together for my earlier report. According to the map boys, the update includes: Estonia Latvia Lithuania Iceland Cyprus Malta Albania Ukraine NOT Belarus, Greece, Cuba, French Overseas Territories But also several CIS states: Georgia Armenia Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Not sure about Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan (it's the North Korea of central asia), nor oil-wealthy Azerbaijan. Mongolia doesn't work for some reason (even though they're a decently open country who get other streamers). Vietnam isn't getting it despite being part of the former HBO Southeast Asia HBO GO group because since 2022 they've been clamping down on foreign streaming. Basically by the end of the year the only non-Russia, non-Sky Atlantic part of Europe that won't have HBO Max is Greece (they get a hub in Vodafone's service, which NO ONE likes) @Ran You live in Sweden - please check with other fan contacts across nearby Baltics/Iceland if their IP addresses suddenly started working for the HBO Max website. It means a launch is coming soon.

The shareholders just had a - nonbinding and largely symbolic - vote that refused to increase Zaslav's executive bonus this year: https://deadline.com/2025/06/warner-bros-discovery-shareholders-nix-ceo-david-zaslav-pay-1236422656/

Oh it's not a solid comparison at all, I agree...sorry I'm just thinking out loud as I putter about through half-finished number sets. Hey, a lot of people were too wary to come back to watch HotD after GoT ended - still not a fair comparison to something like Wheel of Time (shrug). I mean I still personally know people who never even started HotD due to end of GoT backlash. but those 90 day viewership numbers...those I'd be interested in seeing... Well I was rounding....okay the new revised, short conclusions: Average episode viewership dropped about 14% compared to HotD Season 1 First week viewership average (USA only) was around 8.0 to 8.3 (we don't have an exact figure), but this puts it a little behind GoT Season 4's first week viewership but above Season 3's. Season 1 started 10.0 and ended at 9.3. HotD Season 1's average viewership plus 90 days (USA only) was almost as high as GoT Season 7; HotD Season 2 was roughly on par with GoT Season 6 (well, "25" compared to "25.7" for Season 6) We don't have international streaming numbers outside the USA, which have significantly increased compared to a decade ago. Still, in terms of rankings....it seems a lot more people caught up on Season 2 over a longer time period of plus 90 days, enough to change its ranking between GoT seasons (slightly behind season 4, to almost level with season 6 ) I'm not trying to spin these are great "growth" but that the ratings were more stable than I thought.

Hey, after The Last of Us Season 2 ended I've been going over viewership numbers:

Are you going to review it now that the Blu ray is out? It was a great supplement for the movie only viewers...I've been rewatching it with movie only viewers and it was a great way to introduce concepts and backstory that were glossed over in the movies for time reasons - so I was pointing at the screen going "look, this is the Butlerian Jihad, this is why they don't have computers, yes it's like the Geth from Mass Effect (where do you think they got the idea?)" or "this is how Other Memory works and becoming a Reverend Mother, you get hundreds of lifetimes of genetic memory, but if you're not prepared it can drive you insane"....slowly walking them through it.

Intriguing https://x.com/RealPriyanshu9/status/1927175973109178742 HBO is stressing that TLOU had average per-episode viewership of 37 million...WORLDWIDE. They gave the worldwide number, then compared it against the 32 million USA ONLY figure for Season One!! Apparently they don't release global viewership data? I thought one of the provisions of the 2023 strike was that they had to. For transparency in residuals payments. I'm trying to find USA vs Global numbers for comparison... I don't have global numbers for House of the Dragon....but for USA, Season 1 average views per episode was 29 million...which went down to 25 million for Season 2, a dip of about 14%....which...isn't great, but given a two year production gap isn't a complete shock, and it's not without hope given the problems it faced. But....apparently the Last of Us numbers were pretty bad if they're not even releasing them.

It's frustrating how little info has come out on Vince Gilligan's big new scifi project for AppleTV, codenamed "Wycaro 399". It filmed last spring, and he says they're editing it now - Gilligan originally said it was slated for "late summer, maybe later"....and now seems on track for a release some time in Fall. There's been ABSOLUTELY no promos for it, not even posters. On the other hand, this is NOT UNUSUAL for Apple TV shows. They only start promos relatively late -- look at how "Chief of War" put out NOTHING until the first teaser trailer mere days ago...for a show debuting August 1st! So expect nothing until maybe 2 or 3 months out from premiere. ....I suspect based on writing caliber alone that Wycaro could be the next "Severance" scale show.

(shrug) it's only 3 more episodes and they were pretty good, I suggest you put them on for an afternoon - if only to be able to articulate your criticisms better We...don't get a lot of fresh Dune content. It was good much as a good Dune video game can be good - and with a good cast. A good supplement for movie-only viewers who don't know more about the backstory.

Rick and Morty Season 8 premiered the same night as The Last of Us Season 2 finale. I think it’s going to be the show of the summer - from now to early August - in an otherwise very thin TV season. They were on break almost 2 years due to the strike. Quality drastically improved once they got rid of Roiland and his crass ad libbing, to focus on story: seriously, the show was losing momentum since Season 3 but then Season 7 was the best they’ve done since. Mildly annoyed Season 8 premiere was a standalone episode, though well done - seems based on trailer that episode 2 is arc heavy and should have been premiere.

When did you stop? Because even those who liked it admit episode 2 was clunky, but then it snapped back to being good again in episode 3 and got progressively better for each of the following 3 episodes to the finale. It’s short enough I think you should check it out.

After HotD….Dune:Prophecy was REALLY good, it surprised many of us. But can it keep up this level of quality? Never meant to be a flagship. I like watching Apple’s Foundation - despite being a loose adaptation…but it hasn’t captured the public…. …I’m going to hop over to the other thread on “upcoming TV 2026” another issue is that we’re now in the….second “rain shadow” from the strike. The first was “stuff that had to stop filming because of the strike”…now it’s “stuff that couldn’t even be WRITTEN during the strike”, due to the two year production cycle ….is cyberpunk next? We’re getting a high profile Blade Runner TV show on Amazon and a Neuromancer adaptation on Apple. That, and post-apocalyptic video game adaptations. Ugh….i hate to say it…but could the big budget Harry Potter TV show give Fantasy a boost?

Hey everyone, due to last Wednesday's announcement that Dunk & Egg is delayed, plus the start of real House of the Dragon Season 3 filming soon (exterior filming with real spy photos), I got invited to go onto the podcast hosted by Voice of Oldtown and The Grease Goblins for an ad-hoc "State of the Franchise Virtual Panel". It was 2 hours long, so they split it into multiple videos my topic. This is part 1, the first 20 minutes in which we discuss the Dunk and Egg delay - while we discussed specifics, all agreed this wasn’t due to the actual quality of the show and there’s no need for panic. Overall the panel was a call for sanity and not baseless fearmongering ( in the past week it’s spread like a meme that “delay = it must be bad”)

What are the big flagship shows these days? Older shows are wrapping up. After Andor, Star Wars is on break for a bit. Marvel? They just went through a big behind the scenes reform and future projects in the combined “MCU meta-series” seem promising.

He frequently came to my NYC area con. He was in bad health for many years. I’m relieved he isn’t suffering anymore.

The Last of Us Season 2 finale starts at 9 PM EST, about 3 and a half hours from now. I'll be watching it anyway, but check back to see if they post...well, anything. Trailers for any projects, not just this. ....I think they run the trailers for other stuff at the START of programs? is that how they did it for the "coming in 2025" trailer in the HotD Season 2 finale?

I don't know....might as well try. Netflix has a lot of funds and with The Witcher winding down they might want another big fantasy show...and Apple TV doesn't really have a fantasy epic at the moment.

No ‘The Wheel Of Time’ Canceled By Prime Video After 3 Seasons https://deadline.com/2025/05/the-wheel-of-time-canceled-prime-video-1236409657/