Dragons Vs. Rings
Now that the credits have rolled on the first season of House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power, we thought we’d explore the data on the two epic fantasy shows that have been topping streaming charts for the last few weeks.
For the uninitiated, House of The Dragon is a prequel to HBO’s Game of Thrones, whilst Amazon’s The Rings of Power takes place in Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings universe. Both spared no expense to attract viewers — Dragon cost some $200m, an enormous sum, but nothing on the $465m that Rings reportedly cost.
On most metrics, it’s fair to say that both shows were a success, although whether they drew enough new viewers to HBO or Amazon Prime is a harder judgment to make.
Dragon turned out to be the buzzier of the two offerings, regularly generating more search interest on Google than Bezos’s prized prequel. Critics on review-aggregator Rotten Tomatoes were split down the middle, with both shows coming out with a very respectable 85% average rating on the site.
The public, however, were seemingly more decisive. Dragon scored an average 8.8 rating on IMDB across its 10 episodes compared to 7.25 for TROP, the split on user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes was even wider. Rings fans may point to malicious review-bombing trolls to explain the result whilst Thrones fans see their show given the TV fantasy crown, for now at least. For what it’s worth, the Chartr office vote was tied.
