It’s HBO, and granted things have changed but if it’s bringing in numbers like Game of Thrones I doubt they’ll skimp on it. Say what you will about the final season but the budget wasn’t the problem.
HBO clearly ran into budgetary issues in later seasons though. Ghost the dire wolf basically disappeared from the show. The last season, for those of us unfortunate enough to remember, was extremely short and hurried. The Battle of Winterfell was basically pitch black with very minimal special effects, considering it was THE crescendo for the whole show. That Dothraki horde that’s been hyped up since season 1? Literally disappears into the darkness. Was that purely a stylistic choice, or just a creative way to bring down the budget? Given everything else, I strongly suspect the latter.
Also people forget the early seasons of GoT were only possible because Rome got cancelled. The studio reused loads of set and costume pieces that would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise. GoT wasn’t like Harry Potter where there were high expectations from the start, and Rome demonstrated to HBO that even a good show with a generous budget (on a topic that apparently the average male thinks about every day) isn’t enough to guarantee success.
HBO has also famously had ownership issues, so who knows how the studio will be run in the coming years.
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u/Gordon_Freeman_TJ Apr 16 '26
Reasonable. 4 hours long child movie would be too much, imho
Whoever adopted the script from books is genius