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The 7th season of Game of Thrones is about to start. The multi-million dollars series is getting to its end but not quite still. HBO will restart on July 16th in the US, so fans cannot wait to see what will follow. This is what we know so far, please do not read what follows -Spoiler alert – We have warned you.

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Game of Thrones Season 7, the first 3 episodes

According to Entertainment weekly, here are the 3 pitches for the next 3 incoming episodes and as we can see, things have never been so busy!
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Episode 61: “Dragonstone” (July 16)
Jon (Kit Harington) organizes the defense of the North. Cersei (Lena Headey) tries to even the odds. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) comes home.
Writers: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Director: Jeremy Podeswa

Episode 62: “Stormborn” (July 23)
Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) receives an unexpected visitor. Jon (Kit Harington) faces a revolt. Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) plans the conquest of Westeros.
Writer: Bryan Cogman
Director: Mark Mylod

Episode 63: “The Queen’s Justice” (July 30)
Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) holds court. Cersei (Lena Headey) returns a gift. Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) learns from his mistakes.
Writers: David Benioff & D. B. Weiss
Director: Mark Mylod

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The arrival of Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, to Westeros is big bold news. Everything seems to show that she will establish her base at Dragonstone, a former Targaryen castle hold by Stannis Baratheon for decades. From there she might start the reconquest of the Iron Throne.
It is also said that Jon Snow, now King of the North, will face another rebellion against him. What we can say is that he has a heavy hard life to maintain things together in the North.

The business of Game of Thrones, key numbers

Each Game of Thrones Season 7’s episodes will cost 10M$ to produce. HBO is putting a lot of efforts to make the last 2 seasons a blast. If you remember the episode called “Battle of the Bastards”, the numbers were astronomic:

  • 600 crew members + 500 extras. 
  • 70 horses
  • More than 25 days of filming for just one episode. 

HBO also announced that all G.O.T. episodes, as well as other series will be available in HULU for less that 15$ per  month (14.99$). This should increase viewership even more. The last episode of season 6 gathered 8.9 million viewers, which is the series record for a single episode. Adding all the streaming, replays, VCRs, etc… more than 25 million people have watched Season 6, which is 5 million more than season 5. 40% of this viewership comes from online thanks to HBO Go and HBO Now.

The interesting fact is that all these numbers are not record breaking for television. In 1983, the series M.A.S.H. gathered a total of 125 million viewers for its series finale. In 2004, 65.5 million people watched the last episode of FRIENDS. So these numbers are far bigger than what we have today with Game of Thrones. Nevertheless, with the increase numbers of cable channels and the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and even Amazon, the viewer is segmented in many more ways that in the past. So 8.9 million viewers on an episode remains a serious outstanding performance nowadays.

More to come with the  new season 7.

José Amorim

Info sourced at Time.com, Fortune, Entertainment week, Wikipedia, the official GOT website. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available. Images are for illustration purposes only.