The House Of The Dragon finale leaked... again

At this point, HBO might as well add a new series about Westerosi pirates to its growing heap of Game Of Thrones spinoffs. And by pirates, we don’t mean the Greyjoy kind, although the network might want to employ some of that house’s military prowess in their current fight against the other kind of pirate: the ones who keep on leaking their episodes. At the very least, they may want to take advantage of this article’s clear million-dollar Iron Islands spinoff idea; they might need some new proprietary content after losing approximately 30 minutes of the House Of The Dragon season two finale to social media distributors Tuesday night.

ComicBook reports that the videos—14 of them in total—were posted to a TikTok account with no prior uploads, and appeared to be recorded from a screen with a secondary device. The account was banned roughly three hours later, according to Variety, but not before the videos racked up roughly 50,000 to 100,000 views each and—no surprises here—made their way over to Twitter/X and Reddit as well. 

This kind of behavior is probably par for the course when your series bears the Pyrrhic moniker of “most pirated show of all time,” but one would assume that HBO would have learned how to pull up the drawbridge on this type of behavior by now. In 2022, HOTD’s season one finale was also leaked, leading the network to claim that they were “aggressively monitoring and pulling these copies from the internet” in response. That leak was pegged to “a distribution partner” in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa, but cracking down on these three (large!) regions doesn’t totally account for the multiple leaks that plagued Game Of Thrones’ final season, or wherever this new one came from. 

Before this recent skirmish, HBO had tried to quell the threat by refusing to provide advanced screeners of the finale to critics, but that strategy clearly couldn’t snuff out the uprising completely. It’s hard to say whether the network has won any battles at all, and they’re clearly losing the war. Still, the leakers did only release 30 minutes and it was pretty blurry; you can watch the full episode in all its fiery and legal glory when it airs this Sunday, August 4.

In a statement to The A.V. Club, HBO wrote of the leak, “We are aware that clips from the House of the Dragon season finale have surfaced across social media platforms. The clips were posted after an unintentional release from an international third-party distributor. HBO is aggressively monitoring and removing clips from the internet, and fans can watch the episode in its entirety this Sunday night on HBO and Max.”

This story has been updated to include a new statement from HBO.