Mushroom-men have more pull than dragons. This Monday the first season of The last of us said goodbye and the HBO channel has announced the accumulated audiences of the series in the United States: the first six episodes have an average of 30.4 million viewers, which places the adaptation of the cult video game ahead of its star series, La casa del dragón, which at the end of its first season had an average of 29 million according to data from the company itself.
The last of us's budget of around 100 million, therefore, can be taken for more than paid off, especially considering that it cost half as much as the Game of Thrones prequel.
The day after the release of the first episode, it was already seen that HBO had a hit on its hands with 4.7 million viewers among those who watched the beginning on the HBO channel and those who preferred to watch it from the HBO Max platform in the United States on the night of broadcast.
It easily surpassed the data of emblematic series of the channel such as Succession and Euphoria, which at the launch of their previous seasons gathered 1.4 million and 2.4 million respectively on their first night. Who was out of reach were the 9.9 million of La casa del dragón, which had in its favor that it was a series derived from the largest audience phenomenon in the history of the channel.
However, the most interesting thing was to see that the apocalyptic series about an adult, Joel (Pedro Pascal), and a teenager, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), undertaking a road trip through a United States devastated by a fungus that turns humans into walking dead increased its audience week by week.
In its second week it already attracted 5.7 million on the opening night, in the third it made 6.4 million, in the fourth it already added 7.5 million and this upward drift was consolidated until the final stretch with 8.1 million for the penultimate episode and 8.2 million for the last one. The last of us not only worked between subscribers of the HBO channel and the HBO Max platform, but also had established itself as a television event that fans had to see on opening night.
And, while HBO has announced that the first six episodes have a cumulative audience of 30.4 million, they have also revealed that the pilot is already close to 40 million, which means that more than 10% of the population of the United States He has already entered the decadent but hopeful universe taken from Joel and Ellie written by screenwriter Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann, author of the Naughty Boy video game that adapts the production.
HBO Max does not provide consumption data for the series in markets other than the US in order to have a global portrait of the phenomenon of The last of us.
