Search icon

Entertainment

10th Mar 2019

Game of Thrones Season 8 is already breaking records and it hasn’t even aired yet

Wayne Farry

There appears to be no lack of appetite for Game of Thrones

For months now there has been fevered anticipation from fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones as we get closer and closer to the release of the latest and final season of the show.

Who will take the Iron Throne? Will the humans be able to forge and maintain an alliance against the undead army marching from beyond The Wall? Will we finally get to see one of the dragons breakdance? These are all questions that viewers have been asking since the end of season seven.

Few television series have captured the public’s collective imagination as well as this adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s series of books, with fan theories already sprouting up about what will happen in the show’s final season.

We got our first taste of what that may be on March 5, when HBO released the first official trailer for season eight.

We had received a few seconds here and there, but this – coming in at 1 minute, 53 seconds – was by far the most substantial suggestion of what the future of the show holds.

In the trailer we see all the biggest figures from the show – including a terrified Arya Stark being chased by an unseen figure and Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryan marching behind an army – in what amounts to one of the most tantalising trailers the series has seen yet.

It appears to have done the job too, because the trailer has already broken records, being viewed more than 81 million times across all platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram in the first 24 hours after its release.

That breaks the record previously held by season seven of the show, which racked up 61 million views in a single day after hitting the internet.

The first episode of the new season is set to air on April 14 in the United States and April 15 in the United Kingdom.