The Penguin’s Streaming Premiere Beat A Struggling HBO Prequel

Key Takeaways

• The Penguin’s streaming debut outperformed House of the Dragon, hinting at its early success and strong viewer engagement.
• The Penguin’s unique blend of crime drama and comic book elements sets it apart as a potential catalyst for superhero media.
• House of the Dragon’s decline and criticisms highlight The Penguin’s positive reception, positioning it as a promising newcomer in the TV landscape.

The Penguin is just getting started with its first season run and has already seen success with its linear TV debut on HBO, but its second wind on the Max streaming platform has given the show an impressive leg up over another high-profile show that took the same route.

The Penguin is the one spin-off from Matt Reeves’ 2022 blockbuster The Batman that made it through the Warner Bros. Discovery machine to get into production and finally make its way to audiences. Taking on all the disparate ideas from the spinoffs that didn’t work out, the show would come out the other end a much stronger project, leading to it being upgraded from a streaming exclusive project to getting approved to air on HBO. From early looks, many thought that The Penguin could be a catalyst for superhero media to broaden its horizons due to its clear crime drama DNA blended with the grounded comic book feel that it retained from The Batman. This potential would seemingly pay off when the show debuted to critical and fan acclaim.

While Colin Farrell went through a lot during the production of The Penguin, the show’s first outing on streaming seems to indicate that the harrowing experience of crafting and embodying the character was well worth it. In a recent report by TheWrap, it was highlighted that the premiere episode of The Penguin logged views from an impressive 3.2 million households over its first four-day period on the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streaming platform. Notably, this exceeds the welcome that House of the Dragon, another major franchise spin-off that debuted on the same platform in 2022, garnered in the same time frame. House of the Dragon, which has a groundswell of support from fans of its parent series, Game of Thrones, only managed to hit 2.8 million households over the first four days.

The comparison between the two shows is pretty interesting, as House of the Dragon took a similar path to audiences by being approved for both linear viewing on HBO and released for streaming on Max. While the show had an amazing first season run and got renewed on the strength of its premiere, fans will know that things aren’t quite so rosy anymore. To the surprise of many viewers who experienced the fairly well-received start to the second installment, House of the Dragon’s season 2 finale fell short of expectations for a Game of Thrones universe installment, receiving a lot of criticism from all sides of the discussion and garnering a score from fans and critics almost as low as the widely disliked ending to the original Game of Thrones series.

There’s a lot to be said for House of the Dragon taking on flak in the same way that Game of Thrones did at the end of its run, but its problems actually make the new contender look better. While The Penguin getting greenlit for linear viewing on HBO, in addition to the original plan to develop it for streaming on Max, was a good sign for the show overall, it doesn’t follow that this dual release would have a positive impact on streaming numbers. Furthermore, Game of Thrones was on air and in public discussion for eight years straight, while The Batman was released in 2022 as a one-off project with no follow-up yet, save for The Penguin itself. Even taking into account the time that elapsed between the end of Game of Thrones and the start of House of the Dragon in 2022, this still makes both The Batman and The Penguin look pretty impressive in view of the performance of the latter on its streaming debut.

The reasons for the current plight of House of the Dragon become clear when taking into account the fact that original franchise creator George RR Martin slammed House of The Dragon season 2 for ungainly tweaks made to the narrative that diverged from the events in his 2018 work Fire & Blood, which serves as the source material for the series. Fortunately for The Penguin, the only other entities it has to answer to are The Batman and its own showrunner’s headcanon. Fans will have to wait and see whether The Penguin manages to keep this early optimism or hit some major derailment down the line.

The Penguin is available to stream on Max and on linear TV every Sunday on HBO.

Source: TheWrap