As ‘Game of Thrones’ author George R.R. Martin rips HBO over changes to ‘Dragon’ and fans ding the second season of Prime Video’s pricey ‘LoTR’ adaptation, executives cautiously navigate a minefield.
Call the banners and muster the dragons, there is trouble in the kingdoms!
HBO’s big-budget fantasy epic House of the Dragon and Amazon’s even bigger-budget fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are encountering a hailstorm of catapulted projectiles.
For Rings, the issue is familiar. The $715 million series — which debuted two years ago to strong ratings and fandom discord — unveiled the first four episodes of its new season. The consensus is that this new run is firmly an improvement, but some critics and fans maintain it’s not as strong as it should be (many contrast the show to Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning trilogy — and how can you not? — even though that saga arguably set an impossibly high bar for a prequel series to follow). The show’s Rotten Tomatoes scores are similar to the first season — a very good 83 percent among critics, a disappointing 58 percent among fans (some percentage of whom seem angrily determined to watch every episode while simultaneously insisting the show is unwatchable, helping feed a cottage industry of Rings-bashing content creators).
“The Fellowship had to look to each other, and those who support it, and remember what it’s fighting for,” says J.D. Payne, who is showrunner along with Patrick McKay. “And when we see that millions of people are watching this and responding so positively to it — that’s who we’re fighting for. And those who watch every episode and [negatively] write about it on social media and make YouTube videos, we’re happy to have you guys, too. It wouldn’t be a journey through Middle-earth without some trolls along the way.”
As for Rings’ ratings, third-party services show a steep drop from the series’ debut season. The spin from Amazon goes like this: Of course the ratings are down, they were so huge last time. There is something to this. Even Prime Video hits like Fallout and The Boys haven’t matched Rings’ season one on a global basis (Fallout did top the show in the U.S.). Amazon says the new season is doing well internationally and is on track to be a Top 5 season for Prime Video.
The company has also said 40 million viewers worldwide have watched at least some of the first three new Rings of Power episodes through the sophomore season’s first 11 days. The company did not make clear, however, how much of the season, or an episode, those 40 million people viewed.
A third season has been in the works for months, though it has not been officially greenlighted. After seeing season two’s premiere ratings, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter the company remains committed to the show’s original five-season plan.
Then there is Dragon, whose problems are more interesting. The second season incensed some fans after spending eight episodes leading to a massive cliffhanger — a climactic battle sequence that was pushed from a shortened season two to season three, apparently for budget reasons (which has led to more “David Zaslav ruins everything” chatter online). In the ratings, the season dipped about 10 percent from the show’s first season, but the numbers do remain high.
Two weeks ago, saga author (and Dragon co-creator and executive producer) George R.R. Martin, who has been complimentary about Dragon in the past, posted on his blog that he was going to reveal “everything that’s gone wrong” with the show. Smart money could have been wagered on this never happening — surely HBO would do everything in its power to persuade Martin not to post.
But last week, Martin did, and the result was fascinating: a candid rundown of his concern about the removal of a young character in the show that, in his view, has already led to a key sequence being weakened in the second season and will cause greater creative issues in seasons three and four. The post included some of his discussions with Ryan Condal (who became sole showrunner in season two after Miguel Sapochnik’s departure) and tipped to what the showrunner has planned for next season.
Martin’s post vanished within a few hours. An HBO insider says executives were “frustrated but not surprised.” Martin and HBO have been increasingly at loggerheads, with the author privately making his concerns known for a while. The network also issued a statement saying it supports Condal’s “extraordinary” work. Condal addressed the matter in a podcast in a rather heartfelt-sounding way that basically amounted to: We are trying the very best we can and adapting this material is insanely hard; it’s full of impossible choices — a sentiment the showrunners of Game of Thrones would certainly raise a glass to.
The previous series looms silently over this. Martin is understandably passionate and protective about the world he created. He has imagined precisely how pivotal scenes would ideally play out onscreen and gamely stayed mum for years when Thrones took liberties with his material that he didn’t agree with.
Reached for comment about the Dragon situation, Martin instead offered some high praise for his next HBO series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, coming to the platform next year. “I visited the set in Northern Ireland in July and loved what I saw,” Martin wrote. “Great cast. [The lead characters] Dunk and Egg look as if they walked out of the pages of my book. My readers are going to love them. I certainly do. [Showrunner Ira Parker] is doing a great job.”
It also should be said that none of the above has deterred the vast majority of the shows’ respective supporters online. You wade into discussion forums for Dragon and Rings, and each has a ton of fans who love these shows and geek out over every minutia to a degree that’s tough to imagine anybody expressing about, say, Presumed Innocent or The Perfect Couple. Oftentimes conflicts arise from people caring so much about these worlds, their fans and creatives alike, that they are not just considered stories, but sacred historical records (which is part of what makes them great).