The seven season’s premiere of Game of Thrones, aired on Sunday 16 July on HBO, set a new record for the series, as Variety states: 16 million viewers watched the episode, ten of which live (on HBO official channels) and 6 on the official streaming platforms. It’s the most watched premiere in the history of the show (started in 2009) and of the broadcaster itself, as opposed to Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, still propose the old-school model of broadcasting built on the expectation of the next episode, week after week. And it works, thereby laying the foundations of the huge success thanks to this unrestrained affection of the audience, who isn’t limited to watching the episode, it comments it on every possible social network and it sets a new state-of-the-art record for the series, the most “social” episode in the history of television: 2,4 million tweets have been written while the broadcast was in progress, thanks to the Ed Sheeran’s cameo too.
HBO proves (once again) that, besides the way the series is offered to the public, the quality makes a difference. Netflix, for instance, while remaining a giant (91 nominations for the upcoming Emmy Awards), was the subject of controversy with its audience, both for the cancellation of popular series such as Sense 8 and The Get Down and for the lower quality of its latest series and films (War Machine, for instance, despite its stellar cast, was not critically acclaimed, as Variety and Forbes state).
The success of Game of Thrones affects the large market of locations for film and TV, creating a ripple effect.
Stefano Baschiera, in an article for Link, provides impressing data concerning Northern Ireland, the region where most of the scenes are filmed: every episode needs units of 150 people working on more locations at the same time and a season implies a continuous work of 21 weeks a year. Since 2009, when HBO rented the Paint Hall Studios, the economic return was 10:1 on a total amount of 116 million pounds, divided between studios and external locations. Not to mention, obviously, the other productions that have been enticed by the success of Game of Thrones: the series acted like a catalogue for the wide variety of locations and enticed many producers and broadcasters intrigued by the business model.
Against a tax incentive introduced by the UK in 2013, Northern Ireland had for years experimented other ways to encourage productions to invest in their own territory: besides a wide variety of available locations strategically spread over a not huge territory and easily reachable, the film commission relied on a huge financial contribution for the production too. Moreover, the required huge amount of work contributed to create an infrastructure network divided between studios, hosting also other international productions, and accommodation facilities for the insiders that adds up to local companies and authorities involved in the filming (in the article of Link, for instance, reference is made to the construction of temporary roads used to take the production units to the sets, whose work has been assigned to local companies).
The near end of Game of Thrones (this is the seventh and penultimate season) is not a cause of concern: eight years of international productions contributed to make Belfast the second UK centre in terms of population in the audio-visual industry, second only to London. It’s an impressing result for a region that, only ten years ago, was in crisis because of a missing economic return on a territory that is one of the most coveted in the world nowadays.
