When Hollywood gossipers talked about adapting A Song of Ice and Fire, everyone, with The Lord of the Rings in mind, spoke of a saga of three-hour movies, lowering the sensationalism and aimed at audiences over 13. However, DB Weiss and David Benioff, when they met with George RR Martin for five hours to buy the rights, immediately took that idea out of his head. It had to be done on HBO, with insane spending and no censorship issues, or it wouldn’t be done, period.
Downloads of Thrones
We all know what happened next, right? Game of Thrones became a pop culture phenomenon that lasted 8 seasons (and led some people to absolute disappointment with its ending), and brought HBO one of the biggest successes in its history, despite the fact that, due to the author’s slow pace, they had to invent the ending. Yes, they raised enough money to live a thousand lives, but also a small great disappointment: it became the most pirated series in history.
From the beginning, Game of Thrones was one of the most pirated series in history, from 2012 until its end in 2019. In fact, in 2015 it won the Guinness World Record for the most pirated series: before HBO Max arrived in most countries, it was the easiest way to watch it. Connecting to the Torrent and being able to watch the episode five minutes later was a religion for millions of people around the world. In fact, only in the United States, as many people watched it live as downloaded it a few minutes later: 4.5 million people.
It’s hard to imagine, now that HBO Max has 125 million registered users worldwide, that so many people would download Game of Thrones, but the fanaticism reached a point where the United States ambassador to Australia, Jeff Bleich, was forced, given the high number of downloads in the country, to condemn the practice in a statement via Facebook, of all places, where he said “It is especially concerning to find that Australian fans are some of the biggest offenders with the highest piracy rates in the world regarding Game of Thrones”.
That said, HBO wasn’t too worried. In fact, they admitted that it showed that “the demand is there. And it hasn’t negatively impacted DVD sales. Piracy is something that comes when you have an incredibly successful series”. In the end, it seems it wasn’t such a big deal, because as soon as the series ended, with a final episode watched (legally) by 13.6 million people live and 5.7 million on delay just in the United States, they immediately started making spin-offs like hotcakes. We don’t know how many people, though, continued to pirate House of the Dragon.
