After the immensely popular premiere of Games of Thrones’ fourth season on Sunday night in the US (2am Monday morning UK time, or 9pm Monday evening if you have a regular sleeping pattern), the following piece of news should come as no surprise whatsoever, though still a very welcome confirmation in the eyes of most fans. Yes, HBO has renewed Game of thrones for two more seasons.
We all knew it was going to be big, and that Game of Thrones was going to continue to rule the small screen for sometime (though George R. R. Martin has been talking up the possibility of eventually finishing his epic tale with a couple of big budget movies rather than spinning out the TV series indefinitely), yet no-one could’ve predicted just how big an event the Game of Thrones season 4 premiere would become; a 52% rise in viewership from last year’s season 3 premiere saw the number of viewers rise sharply to 6.6 million; with enough people watching via streaming services to crash HBO Go (the American network’s streaming service).
New servers are being installed ready to cope with the increased demand ahead of next week’s episode “The Lion and the Rose”, with HBO programming president David Lombardo saying that “Game of Thrones is a phenomenon like no other, [series creators] David Benioff, and D. B. Weiss, along with their talented collaborators, continue to surpass themselves, and we look forward to more of their dazzling storytelling” with the announcement of season 5 and 6.
With the fourth season currently covering the second half of the third book (A Storm of Swords) in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga (chronicling the epic power struggles in the fictional land of Westeros), the TV show is slowly catching up to the books; though Martin is currently working on book six (The Winds of Winter) ahead of a planned seventh book (potentially the final novel), and still has plenty of time to finish it before HBO overtakes him.
If you’re yet to see the season 4 premiere “Two Swords”, you can watch the official Game of Thrones season 4 trailer here, along with a selection of images.
Matt Wheeldon – @TheMattWheeldon.
Source: HBO.
