Game of Throne Legacy: Netflix and The Witcher

The last ‘Game of Thrones’ (2011-2019, David Benioff, D.B Weiss) episode came out in May 19, 2019 and the TV show universe is in mourning. 

As the season ended, a lot of HBO viewers threatened to cancel there subscription to the streaming platform. 

It was not actually that bad as HBO only experience a revenue loss of 16% in the post-finale time-span. That is probably due to their strategic launch of the long awaited fantasy drama ‘His Dark Materials‘ (2019, Jack Thorne) that premiered on the platform on November 3rd, only few month after the end of Game of thrones.  

However, His Dark Materials was not the only fantasy/ Science-fiction show to try and steal the spotlight left by GoT. Around the same time on November 1st, Apple TV finally launched their own streaming services with original Sci-Fi web series casting Jason Momoa as lead; ‘SEE‘ (2019, Steven Knight). 

A few days after on November 12, Disney arrived as a giant in the online streaming industry launching alongside Disney + their first Star Wars series ‘The Mandalorian‘ (2019, Jon Favreau). At the start of December, the series dethroned ‘Stranger Things‘ as the  most in demand show in the world with 31.9 times more in-demand than any other title according to Parrot Analytics and their analyze of streaming, peer-to-peer protocols, social media engagement, blogging, photo sharing, and research engines. Game of Thrones seemed like they found their successor. 

That was all before Netflix and ‘The Witcher’ (2019, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich). After the ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina‘ (2018, Roberto Aguirre Sacasa) and ‘Umbrella Academy‘ (2019, Steve Blackman), the giant American media-services provider produced yet another fantasy drama series that aired on the platform on December 20th. Already the most watched TV series on Netflix, Henry Cavill was fast to dethrone Pedro Pascal at the top of the TV food-chain. Between the 22nd and the 28th December, the monster hunter generated nearly 127 million demand expressions while baby Yoda produced 115 million demand. People are already cancelling their subscription to Disney +, making The Witcher the new prime fantasy show

Moreover, Kristofer Hijvu, playing Tormund Giantsban in Game of Throne just got confirmed to play a character named Nigel in the season 2 of The Witcher, making it also the legitimate Game of Throne successor.

Netflix is worrying though, is the hype going to last?