The final season of Game of Thrones is poised to be the biggest TV event of 2019, and accordingly, everyone seems pretty hyped about it. Now there are some new numbers that show the extent of the pre-season excitement: the debut of the Season 8 trailer this week shattered HBO records, racking up 81 million views across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter in the 24 hours after its Tuesday release. That dethrones the network’s prior reigning trailer champ, which was, you guessed it, the Season 7 Game of Thrones trailer, which only managed a puny 61 million views in first day of its release back in 2017.
This is just the latest in a long line of records the show has broken. They range from the lofty—GoT has won more Emmy Awards than any other drama, to the unavoidable—the show was the world’s most pirated program for years, to the unusual—it featured one of the tallest actors in the world, Neil Fingleton, who played the giant Mag the Mighty before his death two years ago. The record breaking will undoubtedly continue with the show’s much-anticipated final season. The Season 7 finale was HBO’s most watched episode ever, pulling in more than 12 million viewers, a number that’s almost sure to be topped in the last episodes.
Of course, some of those millions of trailer views are undoubtedly from repeat watchers trying to puzzle out the trailer’s many plot clues, like who exactly is leading the Golden Company against Jon and Daenerys and whether Jon will finally get to ride a dragon. If you’re one of the apparently very few people who haven’t yet caught the clip, check it out below.
