“Game of Thrones” has now taken to breaking its own records – not just other shows’.
Sunday’s episode of “Game of Thrones” showed the much-anticipated Battle of Winterfell, showing each fan favorite character fighting off the White Walkers and inching one step closer to taking his or her seat on the Iron Throne. The battle garnered so much attention that it broke the series’ own record for the greatest number of viewers in a single night.
According to the New York Times, HBO has reported that the episode had 17.8 million viewers on Sunday, narrowly breaking a viewer-count record held by the “Game of Thrones” season 8 premiere episode, which clocked in at 17.4 million viewers on release night. This number set the record for most-watched premiere for any HBO series in history.
The viewer count continues to climb as the episode remains available for streaming to HBO subscribers, and the season 8 premiere episode now has over 38 million viewers. The previous season of “Game of Thrones” had a grand total of 32.8 million viewers.
With numbers like these, season 8 is on track to beat season 7’s viewership, which had episodes garnering an average of 30.6 million viewers each.
However, viewers aren’t just checking in to catch the episode silently. Sunday night’s episode also broke a record on Twitter. 7.8 million tweets later, episode 3 became the most Tweeted about TV episode of all time. As it turns out, users had the most stuff to say about Arya, the Night King, Bran, Jon Snow, and Cersei.