HBO’s penny-pinching is partly responsible for House of the Dragon’s disappointing second season

The finger-pointing around House of the Dragon‘s disappointing second season has started.

The show featured only one battle throughout the season and was largely devoid of action otherwise. Meanwhile, the show’s best characters were left treading water for most of the season. Daemon spent the season hallucinating ghosts at Harrenhal, while Rhaenyra spent the majority of season two repeating the same conversations, trying to find any way she could to avoid a war. It was a far cry from what we expected at the end of season one, when we thought the Blacks would be out for revenge following Lucerys being eaten by Vhagar.

It all culminated in the second-lowest rated finale among every season of House of the Dragonand Game of Thrones, with House of the Dragon’s season two finale currently sitting at 50% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, narrowly edging out Game of Thrones’ infamous season eight finale at 47%. So what went wrong with one of HBO’s flagship programs? The series showrunner, Ryan Condal, offered his own reason for the disappointing season: a lack of budget.

Something was missing from the finale

An hour-long trailer for season three

HBO/Max

Following the conclusion of season two, House of the Dragon’s showrunner, Ryan Condal, did a virtual press conference with a few journalists. He addressed some of the major criticisms the show’s most recent season has received. He even acknowledged that the end of season two felt anticlimactic, revealing that they made the difficult decision to push an expansive naval battle, known as the Battle of the Gullet in the books, into the beginning of season three rather than filming it for season two. He explained the reasoning behind that decision being driven by budget decisions, saying, “One of the challenges of making television at any scale [is] nobody has infinite time and resources. When you’re a showrunner, you’re always in the position of having to balance storytelling and the resources that you have to tell that story.”

So Condal argues that budget constraints are the main reason season two ended in a lull. Is that really a fair argument though? House of the Dragon’s second season was rumored to cost HBO over $20 million dollars per episode. That’s after the first season cost the network $16 million per episode. In terms of pure cost though, that’s comparable to other major series. Yellowstone’s fifth season cost $12 million per episode and the recent Walking Dead spin-off, The Ones Who Live, cost $13 million per episode. There’s also Netflix’s Stranger Things, which cost a staggering $30 million per episode in its fourth season, and Amazon’s Rings of Power series, which reportedly cost $58 million per episode. Comparing just what it costs to make these shows doesn’t quite tell the whole story though.

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HBO is paying a lot for House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon is a more expensive undertaking than other shows

HBO

Game of Thrones helped break new ground in television. It’s the type of content that was almost exclusively reserved for films. That’s why its development process shares more in common with blockbuster movies than with other TV shows. Battle scenes with hundreds of extras and creatures that cost a lot to render in CGI, like dragons and direwolves, weren’t normal viewing on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. before Game of Thrones. Even series like The Walking Dead, which can require huge sets, extreme makeup and costumes, and the occasional CGI scene, don’t compare to the scope that HBO attempted to pull off with Game of Thrones, with filming at real-life castles around the world. Stranger Things and The Rings of Power both might cost more, but they have built-in costs that House of the Dragon doesn’t have to account for. Stranger Things is paying $78 million alone to keep the original cast together for another season, while Rings of Power reportedly had to pay $250 million just to get the rights to make the Lord of the Rings spin-off from the Tolkien estate.

If you cut those exorbitant costs from Rings of Power and Stranger Things, House of the Dragon might actually be the most expensive TV show currently airing. Even with that, HBO is obviously cutting corners in the hopes of trimming down costs at the expense of the story Ryan Condal and the rest of the team working on House of the Dragon are trying to tell. This isn’t unusual, as Game of Thrones showrunners Dan Benioff and David Weiss often revealed that keeping budgetary costs down was a factor in decisions made for the show. Jon Snow’s direwolf Ghost was often left on the cutting room floor to avoid HBO having to pay to render the giant wolf. There are also battles that were mostly kept off-screen in the original series, like Tyrion leading the mountain clans to battle in season one or Robb Stark’s capture of Jaime Lannister. We saw neither of those events in the original series, but it didn’t feel like we were missing out by not seeing them, which is the real problem.

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While budgetary concerns may have played a role in House of the Dragon’s second season being a disappointment, it’s hard to say that HBO isn’t giving Condal and his team the money they need to be successful. While the budget may have played a role in us not getting a battle to close out season two, it wouldn’t have fixed what was wrong with this season. Fans are justified in saying the season lacked action, but that was never a problem for Game of Thrones. The original could go weeks without so much as a sword being drawn, but every interaction between characters would leave you on the edge of your seat. That’s where House of the Dragon has noticeably come up short. While there weren’t a ton of action scenes, they were about as good as any we saw in Game of Thrones, but when House of the Dragon tried to rely on story instead of action, it becomes a show with interesting characters doing nothing of interest.

HBO is becoming more and more reliant on Game of Thrones content. There are currently seven spin-offs in some form of development for the channel, including A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a new series hitting HBO in Summer 2025. It’s likely that we could be returning to Westeros every summer to check out new series in the coming years, but how long will audiences stick around if the shows are of middling quality? Already, there’s a large segment of the Game of Thrones fanbase that has checked out because of the disappointing ending to the original series. If House of the Dragon continues on a downward trend that began in season two, or if A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms disappoints, it’s easy to imagine HBO pulling the plug on more expensive spin-offs.

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