Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
See, I think that was the plan all along, to totally own all the losers that pirated GoT, by totally spoiling the show for everyone.
Let's be real. HBO wanted to hold on to their cash cow for as long as possible, but D&D just shat all over the last season to get that sweet Star Wars cash.
Nobody was on-board with anything in that last season except D&D, who just wanted to finish it off as fast as possible. Not even the actors.
The hilarious thing is how their own bungling of the last season cost them the Star Wars gig. Maybe if they'd actually put in some effort instead of half assing it, they'd have gotten the job. But then again, the show was on a downward spiral since the end of Season 4, and Dumb and Dumber's only talent was adapting the books really well (and even then, they still fudged details), so I suppose this was bound to happen.
Dumb and Dumber’s only talent was adapting the books really well
Honestly, I want more Hollywood writers who are good at adapting books, instead of hating the source material and doing a terrible job winging it.
I can't count the number of TV shows ruined by Hollywood writers usurping the universes from multi-million dollar and very successful source material, just to create their own shitty version themselves. In fact, it's much easier to adapt source material, so I don't even understand why they don't do it out of pure laziness. If they could just drop their fucking egos for a bit, they could be as famous as D&D.
Another recent example of a horrible adaptation of a massive franchise is what Paramount did to Halo with their show. I can't understand why they keep hiring writers that actively hate the source material and are only interested in taking existing stories and mangling them into their own shitty "vision". It's like Hollywood either hates writers who have actual passion for the franchises they're adapting, or they can't find them, which can't be the case since these are beloved universes with millions of fans, many of whom are bound to be writers eager to work on an adaptation. They always hire talentless hacks interested in nothing more than a paycheck and doing what they want, not what the fans want. It's infuriating.
Witcher, Foundation, The Stand, Y: The Last Man, Wheel of Time, recent Star Trek, Rings of Power, Legend of the Seeker... the list goes on and on. Sandman is only good because Neil Gaiman is keeping a tight leash on the series.
And then they cancel the rest that were turning out good, like The Expanse.
Do you notice a pattern?
Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.
There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.
As I see it, that's a big part of the problem: For the last century "a writer" was always "the literary type". There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn't hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.
And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.
In that context, I don't think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire "a real writer", there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.
There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers.
That just sounds like some hardcore gatekeeping and No True Scotsman bullshit to me.
I also don't think these new series writers are Boomers or Gen Xers, either. They are a bunch of young bloods with shit for brains and a lack of experience. It's not a taught hatred, but inflated egos.
But, you can ruin a sci-fi or fantasy series by hiring the completely wrong type of writer. Those last few seasons of Dr Who certainly proved that, hiring a bunch of fucking soap opera writers, oof.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I'd argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
That they threw away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn't written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed miserably.
HBO told the show runners(D&D) they could take as long as they wanted to finish the series. D&D had just landed jobs at the helm of a new Star Wars trilogy so they were eager to wrap up Thrones and start raking in that Disney cash. They made the last season shorter than other seasons, it sucked and they ended up losing the Star Wars deal.
Considering the star wars stuff that's been coming out, if you told me they were responsible for it, i'd believe you
Tldr; the whole 6 first season they set up the table for some really juicy stuff and in the last season, some side quests were either ignored or fast-tracked to fit in 1/3 of an episode. Realistically, you had content for at least 3+ more seasons. But since GRR Martin is so slow to write his books (I don't blame him, just pointing out the obvious), the producers of the show had to cut corner and take huge liberties that didn't make any sense
A surprising amount went wrong.
While there are a sea of complaints, the biggest for me was that all of the characters stopped having internal logic. Take Jamie, he had a character arc moving from a vain knight avoiding responsibility and having an incestuous relationship with his sister, to having depth, showing that he was wracked with guilt for breaking his oath to help people. Falling in love with a woman for her character and who she was. Being responsible and honorable again. Then the last season came around and he dropped all of his growth to be with his sister.
It's like D&D decided that there would be a cool scene of him dieing with Cersi and didn't care how he got there.
Zero sympathy. If they wanted to reduce the amount of illegal streamers, all they've got to do is make their content more accessible.
Release it on multiple streaming platforms, not just their own. Ensure its released globally at the same time. And get rid of the geo-blocking.
The lack of reasonable legal alternatives is what drives piracy.
As evidenced by the brief moment in history when Netflix was all that and it drove video piracy all but to extinction.
This is the case still with Spotify, apple music, deezer, etc... Multiple services with few if any exclusives means almost all music piracy has stopped. Somehow, the record companies continue to survive.
I think we're going to start to see music services going that way soon, for the first time I've started to see that songs in my primary play list are now not available in my region.
I admit I dont know what songs yet, am on a road trip at the moment, but it makes me worry that it's going to get worse.
That´s so insane, right? I mean, they practically had us in the bag with netflix. People either had their own account or chipped in to use someone elses one BUT EITHER WAY, THEY PAID FOR IT! And then came one of the rare moments where more competition was actually bad.
It's not the competition that's bad! It's the anti competitive laws that allowed it to spoil. Companies saw how profitable Netflix was and pulled their shows from the platform to artificially create a reason for consumers to use their own shitty services. Netflix was no longer able to purchase those titles.
I would need even more. Let me buy it digitally. Not streamed, not with some draconian DRM. Just let me buy the MKV files straight from HBO, and I won't pirate them.
They have to be aware of how easy it is to rip a blu-ray, yet those are still for sale. So let's just skip the middleman and give me legal remuxes.
I remember here in the Netherlands that you could only watch HBO through a specific internet provider (ziggo-Vodafone). I'd have to switch goddamn ISP's to pay for their show. That gave me all the justification to pirate the shit out of it.
I can't fathom why these media companies still love to do exclusivity agreements. There's no way it's more profitable than just allowing everyone to watch your show from any service, with commissions for the number of views.
I'd probably start paying for a streaming service again if I could watch every show in one place. But I'm not interested in playing musical subscriptions.
Ensure its released globally at the same time
This was easily the biggest driver. For GOT, I had legal access but I was expected to wait over a month, by which time because the internet - the spoilers would have been completely unavoidable.
Instead it was destroyed by two greedy fucks rushing the ending two seasons early so they could move on to their next cash grab flop!
Yup. Money was never a problem for D&D. HBO was willing to give them all the time and money they needed. That is a very rare thing in entertainment.
What WAS their next cash grab though?
It was supposed to be Star Wars but they messed up GoT so badly they lost the Star Wars bid.
What a shame that somebody else got the badly-messing-up-Star-Wars gig.
luckily the showrunners were around to finish the job
Game of Thrones was destroyed by the writers lol
The call came from inside the house!!!
The files are in the computer
There was a point in time when GOT was only available via an $80 a month pay tv subscription after the earlier seasons were aired on regular television. Once again, piracy is an access issue - not a theft issue.
Not only was it hard to get the subscription, but it was hard to get it in your country if you weren’t US
If it's true that pircay nearly destroyed GoT, that means that we as pirates have power. We're a counter balance against ridiculous payment schemes and arbitrary limiting of content.
TIL 2.2bn in profit is basically poverty profit, not even worth doing it ... and all because of them evil pirates who would have totally payed for Netflix if they couldn't pirate it.
However, I really loved all the memes and r/freefolk, great stuff that got exponentially better with each season.
hot take: maybe Game of Thrones should have been destroyed
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