It’s been exactly one year today (May 5) since the ‘greatest show of all time’ swiftly became the most disappointing. And it all started with a coffee cup.
Game of Thrones’ final season was tarnished with overwhelming backlash. If Daenerys’ sudden spiral to madness or the anti-climax that was the death of The Night King wasn’t enough to spark a petition to have the entire last chapter re-written, it was the tardiness of leaving a coffee cup on the table in The Last of The Starks.
HBO reportedly spent close to $100million (£80million) on Game of Thrones’ swansong and scuppered it all with a £1 cup of coffee.
A year on, the drama kept unfolding. Blame was bounced back and forth among the Game of Thrones cast – Sophie Turner placed the guilt firmly on Emilia Clarke, which made sense. The cup was literally inches away from Daenerys, staring at the Mother of Dragons right in the face.
Emilia, however, pointed the finger at Lord Varys star Conleth Hill.
‘We had a party before the Emmys recently and Conleth, who plays Varys, who’s sitting next to me in that scene, he pulls me aside and he’s like, “Emilia, I have got to tell you something, love. The coffee cup was mine,”’ she told Jimmy Fallon during his talk show.
He was having none if it, however: ’You know, there’s no proof that I did it. So accuse away!’
But while Game of Thrones’ reputation never really recovered, coffee giant Starbucks couldn’t believe their luck.
Overnight, everyone was talking about the infamous ‘Starbucks coffee cup’.
Game of Thrones stars were inundated with questions from hungry journalists desperate to know how to find a local Starbucks in Westeros, said cup became the breakout star of Game of Thrones’ final season and was valued at $250,000 (£200,000) should anyone have been able to retrieve it.
The coffee chain went viral without spending a penny.
According to CNBC, Starbucks subsequently made $2.3 billion (£1.7 billion) in free advertising.
‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime collision of opportunity for Starbucks,’ said marketing expert Stacy Jones.
‘But really, this is just the tip of the iceberg, because what isn’t being monitored or estimated is the word of mouth and social media on top of this.’
The only thing was, the cup didn’t belong to Starbucks. It belonged to small independent Belfast cafe, Paper Cups who, in turn, missed out on billions.
‘I think it’s bloody disgusting,’ Paper Cup owner John McKinney told Metro.co.uk at the time.
‘It takes the promotion away from smaller businesses that need it, such as ours, or someone else’s whose cup it could’ve been.
‘It’s clearly not even from Starbucks! The nearest Starbucks is miles away.’
HBO immediately removed all traces of the cup from The Last of The Starks and stressed the ordeal was ‘blown out of proportion’ because ‘it has not happened with ‘Thrones’ so far.’
Only, two weeks after art director Hauke Richter made such a statement, a rogue water bottle was spotted lurking behind Samwell Tarly’s feet. And not only did the second WTF mishap take place in the finale but in the scene *spoiler alert* Bran Stark was made ruler of the Six Kingdoms and the race to the throne was over – aka the moment we all spent the best part of a decade waiting for.
Of course, Game of Thrones wasn’t brought down by a coffee cup alone. Even several stars of the epic have gone on to admit their closing storylines weren’t up to par with the quality of the show’s early seasons, largely navigated by the texts of George RR Martin, who, for reasons unbeknown to anyone else, hasn’t managed to finish his story, leaving showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff to run riot with their own narrative. And run riot they did.
But that paper cup was the moment which sealed, for many fans, their worst fears: after almost two years of agonising for season eight, the promise of record-breaking budgets and finally answers to the countless questions we spent eight years sweating over – Game of Thrones fluffed it.
It’s been long disputed that disappointment which caused almost two million fans to call for a re-write of season eight was down to expectations being too high. That coffee cup begs to differ.
Game of Thrones (minus coffee cup) is available to stream on NOW TV.
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