I don’t agree. GoT was unusual among HBO series in that there was merchandise tied to it. That wasn’t the case for The Sopranos or Westworld or Six Feet Under or anything else. Really the only sustainable business model for HBO is the subscribers. (That may change somewhat now that AT&T is in charge. I think I heard an AT&T exec say to HBO management that they need to vastly expand the number of shows produced so there’s lots of content for people to stream (better to compete with Netflix) and even to make shows in twenty-minute segments so that people can watch them on their smartphones when and where they want. That’s quite a change from the present Sunday night new program model.)
There are dozens of us! Also, I had no idea it was Jaime.
I’d never heard of Viggo Mortensen before the LOTR films either, but he’s become recognizable with a nice run of roles. Though maybe Jon Snow tracks closer to Aragorn and Jamie closer to Boromir, which brings us back as these conversations inevitably do to Sean Bean. The Prince Who Was Promised … To Die In The First Act.
I also didn’t realize Richard Madden was in Rocketman. Up until this point I thought it was Oscar Isaac.
You mean that Sopranos 9 mm handgun I bought was not HBO authorized? 
The Terminator and Star Wars movies she had lead roles in were both massive commercial successes, so I’m not sure how you can say she bombed. I thought she was pretty good in both movies, although certainly opinions can differ.
It does look like they’re going a different route for the next Terminator movie (aside: back to badass Linda Hamilton and adding badass MacKenzie Davis! I’m in!), and I guess it remains to be seen if they’ll write her out of future Han Solo prequel action.
They canceled any other Han Solo prequels. I thought it was great and she was great on it, but it massively under performed.
He was pretty famous in the 90s. I remember discussion at the time of LoTR about how Aragorn was being played by the devil from The Prophecy, which was the stand-out (albeit brief) performance from that movie. His other notables were GI Jane with Demi Moore and A Perfect Murder with Michael Douglas.
What, don’t you have your Tony Soprano bobblehead?
The general rule of thumb is that a movie needs to gross domestically double it’s production budget before it can be profitable (and even then might not be depending on how much was spent on marketing).
Terminator: Genisys had a domestic gross of $89M against a $155M production budget, which would make it a huge bomb. It did happen to do quite well overseas ($440M) but it’s hard to know exactly how much it made because studios usually get less of the overseas sales. Bloomberg estimated it would have to make $400M to break even, so that’s probably around where it ended up at best. Certainly not a massive success.
Solo made $213M domestic (and didn’t do well overseas, only $179M) against a $275M production budget, and probably had a HUGE marketing budget too, so, again, probably a loser.
I heard they didn’t want it to drag on.
Viggo had a pretty big role in Crimson Tide which came out in 1995.
Sure, some of the actors in Game of Thrones were somewhat known prior. Sean Bean was probably the best-known actor of the bunch, but Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon) was in The Full Monty and had a crappy sitcom on CBS in the US. For the most part though, the cast was unknowns (and therefore cheap) but now are world famous.
I remember seeing Matt LeBlanc on Graham Norton’s chat show a few years ago where he described how the producer of Friends took the cast (the main six actors) out to dinner in Los Angeles or Las Vegas before the show started and how they were all sitting there, being ignored by everyone else in the restaurant. LeBlanc said that the producer pointed out that this was probably the last time they could be anonymous in public.
I stand corrected about my claim of commercial success.
To be fair, Solo had generally favorable (although somewhat mixed) reviews and the domestic box office was not that bad. What did it in was a relatively very poor performance in overseas markets. Although the film had its problems, as the fourth Star Wars film in a little over two years it may have been affected by franchise fatigue as well as competition from Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2. In other circumstances it might have done OK.
I wonder why the audience hasn’t suffered franchise fatigue after so many Marvel movies.
Of recent MCU movies (since 2013), Solo had a better domestic box office than Thor: The Dark World and Ant-Man and not that much less than Dr. Strange and Ant-Man and the Wasp. It also did better than several earlier movies like The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger.
I also suspect that, coming out just a few months after the extremely polarizing The Last Jedi, Solo wound up being the victim of aggrieved Star Wars fans who were still pissed off about TLJ.
I think coming out two weeks after Infinity War and one week before Deadpool 2 hurt even more. Departing from their traditional end of the year release schedule was a huge mistake.
Kit Harrington is in rehab for alcohol and other issues so I think he’s done with the show for good. Everything Kit Harington Has Said About Fame Struggles