According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, 13.6 million viewers watched the Game of Thrones finale episode live on the HBO channel. If we add in early number from streaming and on-demand rewatches, it goes up from 13.6 million to 19.3 million viewers. This is a record for Game of Thrones, as well as for HBO. We should mention that this is really not surprising. Game of Thrones’ season finale episodes have broken its overall viewership record each year ever since Season 5 was aired. However, the Season 8 finale has become the most watched episode on HBO itself, and this is something new for Game of Thrones. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Game of Thrones’ final season has been the most watched the show’s history. Among the six most-watched episodes of the show, five have been aired this season. It is worth mentioning that the Season 7 finale is the still the third most-watched episode ever. HBO has further added that additional views will be added in the next week and each episode will get around 44.2 million viewers. However, we should also point out that Game of Thrones has received a lot of criticism this year. After episode 5 (The Bells) was aired, some fans even started an online petition to remake the entire season, If you think that this petition is a joke, we should tell you that it has been signed by more than a million people now. The petition is present on Change.org and it clearly states that the creators of Game of Thrones – David Benioff and D.B Weiss – should not be involved in the remake. The petition says that the duo is “woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on”. Other than this, a highly-upvoted thread on Reddit has been created only to put the creators of Game of Thrones on Google Search each time someone looks for ‘Bad Writers’. Although we don’t think HBO will consider remaking the most expensive show in the history of television, the petition is certainly a way for fans to vent their frustration.
