We all know Game of Thrones is a huge hit. During season 6, an average of 23 million Americans tuned in to watch each week. In an age of fragmented viewership, where there are more TV show options available than ever before and more people abandon traditional TV for streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, that’s not just impressive; it’s damn near miraculous. Those are the kinds of numbers NBC would be happy to have for Friends back in the ’90s, when TV was far less fragmented.
And Game of Thrones has value beyond ratings. While watching the season 7 premiere, fans generated around 1.6 million tweets. In Hollywood, it’s not just about how many eyeballs you have on your show; it’s also about how much buzz you generate, and Game of Thrones generates a lot of buzz. That’s important to HBO’s reputation as the world’s premiere content creator, a reputation it’s been able to maintain even in an age where Netflix and Amazon and others are trying to cut in on its territory with their own splashy, popular, prestigious shows. Thanks in no small part to Game of Thrones, thus far HBO has been able to keep shows like Stranger Things and Homeland and Outlander at bay.
But HBO has a problem: Game of Thrones ends next year, with a final season that is sure to become one of biggest television events in history. What then? Does the bottom fall out of HBO’s business model? What is HBO if it doesn’t have Game of Thrones, which is the rare show that’s both critically lauded and widely popular? In short, what does the network stand to lose when Game of Thrones ends?
The Motley Fool, a financial services company that provides advice for investors, recently tried to answer that question, and its conclusions are both surprising and predictable. Let’s take a closer look.
First of all, The Motley Fool concludes that HBO isn’t likely to lose much money after Game of Thrones is over for one very simple reason: HBO’s revenue is dependent on subscribers, not ads. Had Game of Thrones been on a major network (I know that’s impossible given the all the sex and violence, but roll with me here), its ending would have been devastating, because advertisers would no longer be competing with each other to hawk their products during the commercial breaks. But assuming a critical mass of people don’t drop their HBO subscriptions when Thrones wraps up, HBO won’t take much of a hit.
And if history is any guide, not a ton of people will drop their subscriptions, or at least, not enough to matter in the short run. This isn’t the first time HBO has had the hottest show on TV. Before Game of Thrones redefined television for the 2010s, The Sopranos redefined it for the 2000s. Critics worried that after The Sopranos ended in 2007, HBO would have a crisis on its hands, but in 2008, Time Warner’s cable revenue actually rose by 8%. HBO had other shows like True Blood and Boardwalk Empire to hold viewers’ interest. That tided them over until Thrones came along.
From a business perspective, having alternatives to Game of Thrones will be key to holding on to subscribes after the show wraps. And HBO, to its credit, is feverishly preparing. Watchmen will be a continuation/reimagining of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel, Demimonde is “an epic and intimate sci-fi fantasy drama” from super-producer J.J. Abrams, The Nevers takes place in a wholly original fictional world from Avengers director Joss Whedon, and Lovecraft Country is a horror drama from Get Out director Jordan Peele. And of course there’s HBO’s ace in the hole: a proper prequel to Game of Thrones set thousands of years before the events of the main series, with ideas for other spinoffs in its back pocket. You can’t accuse HBO of resting on its laurels here; it’s laying a ton of track for a post-Game of Thrones future.
But will it be enough? When The Sopranos ended, HBO was one of the few networks capable of committing a lot of money to a gamble like Game of Thrones. Now, everything has changed. Amazon is readying shows based on The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. Netflix is adapting The Witcher. Disney is getting into the streaming game with a live-action Star Wars series, and the list goes on. To paraphrase Varys the Spider, this is no longer a game for one player. HBO no longer has to worry only about making the best thing on TV; it has to make the best best thing, and while it’ll likely be fine in the short run, the distant future is far less certain.
The upside of all this is that the coming battle to be TV’s top dog should be great for viewers, as the networks all try to produce shows impressive and compelling enough to attract us. Whatever happens, we win…unless television itself collapses under the weight of so much money and expectation, but that’s a topic for another time.
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