Something I liked from the serie is that every character had things you would like and things you would hate. While where we are now, I am not fond of Arya … to say it lightly. And I don’t see how you can rescue the character, even if you give her the power to rescue every kid in westeros from the night king.
Mentioning a meme in the serie (gendry rowing) was a bit too much, and a light “jump the shark” moment for the serie.
It’s a lot more than 6 million/episode now, especially with the smaller seasons. They’re spending more money than ever per season, on an even smaller number of episodes.
And they even bumped up the salaries of the cast. The 5 main principals alone are each getting somewhere around 2 million pounds per episode.
And, yes, they wouldn’t be throwing that kind of money into it if they were losing money.
Disc sales alone probably recoup production costs for them. Those season releases sell like crazy in Europe.
I wonder how many seasons each of the actors was originally signed for? And for how much? I have to think several people on the show have high paying offers elsewhere that they either have had to turn down or put on hold because of the length of the show and the unknown outcome of the show. I mean, when the show started how many characters knew they would still be alive in season 6-7?
They all signed standard contracts for TV. The thing Is, you never know what shows will be huge hits, and actors would be foolish to sign on to a contract that limits their pay in that eventuality.
I know that new shows seem to sign their casts much like a sports team does. They are owned for a certain length of time and every now and then someone is able to renegotiate a contract.
But eventually everybody who is important gets a new contract, you saw it with shows like Friends and with the Big Bang Theory.
Yeah, if a show gets that huge, then yes, the actors get their share. It’s sort of like owning money to bank. When a show is tiny, actors (who are like 99% unemployed) are happy to get what they get. But when a show is huge, then the actors at the heart of it basically have all the leverage. And with huge shows, there’s enough money to go around because they’re huge.
Most TV contracts are for like 4-5 years, much like sports teams.
I think the teleporting is an issue of the episodes covering larger and larger periods of time, but with the attrition that has gone on, and with most of the characters now concentrated in the same places, there’s no need to have to cut to a lot of different places anymore.
I also think it’s the fact that we’ve entered the final act of the story. A lot of the exposition and foundation has already been laid in place. It’s time to get on with it.
An entire season costs way less than one Hollywood blockbuster. I’d be shocked if it isn’t a cash cow for them.
Yeah. Assume they’re blowing $10 or $15 million an episode right now. That’s still only $70 or $105 million, which is smaller than a big blockbuster movie. They don’t even need to blow a lot on marketing at this point. They release a single trailer and there are dozens and dozens of articles in major publications (like TIME Magazine and Vanity Fair) literally dissecting it.
Each new episode is accompanied by massive coverage in the media. It’s really unprecedented, especially for a genre show. It’s absolutely crazy that the NYT (whose original review of Season 1 labeled this as boy fiction) is now doing detailed episode reviews each week about a show with dragons and zombies. HBO loves this.
Plus, HBO has to be raking in the merchandising, as well as the overseas markets.
IKEA comes through to show you how to make a fur cloak like they use on the show.
Get hyped
And people is subscribing to their netflix-like service. I imagine the retention rates are amazing low (because their service is filled with gritty dull blockbuster bait) but it will still some people you can build on top.
Between GoT and the Handmaid’s Tale, I’m keeping my sub up for a while. I use it as often as Netflix.
This is a photo of a abandoned hospital in chernobyl, that I am posting for no reason.
I tried to find a good photo of a abandoned blockbuster place, but all of them where too clean for what I was tryiing to show.
Is there a lot of GoT merch? I mean, t-shirts, sure, but most of those are bootleg anyway. They’re not selling loads of Jamie figurines with detachable hands or anything, are they?
There’s a lot of GoT merchandise and derived products, and most of it is from the series and not the novels. We even have video and board games. The franchise is a license to print money, and the money is now squarely within the series and not the novels so much (I wonder what the numbers for the Solar miniature Kickstarter.com game would have been had the used the series license).
OK, I’ll give you the board game (s), but in the grand scheme of things board games are not big money spinners. And certainly none of the video games have blown up.
Isn’t the Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu?
In Spain it’s on HBO Now, since we don’t have Hulu.