There’s a bit of wisdom you pick up pretty quickly when part of your job is trying to figure out how well a given streaming thing is doing, in terms of ratings: Companies keep tight-lipped about the numbers unless they have something to say. makes them look really good. That’s a little more than the population of Florida, all tuning in to see what a TV show based on The Lord of the Rings might look like. (Apparently, suffice it to say, it’s expensive.) The real question, however, is one of those all-important rivalries, the corporate metric that is: The first two episodes of Rings Of Power beat rival HBO fantasy series Game Of Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon? If we can take all the parts at face value – and consider the fuss everyone tends to make with numbers like this, doing things like claiming that turning on an episode for five minutes counts as a “view” – it sounds that probably happened. HBO initially claimed that the premiere of House Of The Dragon attracted around 10 million viewers immediately after its release, with that number rising to around 25 million since then. Rings, meanwhile, reportedly scored the same 25 million viewers in its first 24 hours of availability. G/O Media may receive a commission [via Variety]
