'Game Of Thrones': By The Numbers
From the budget to the beheadings, THR breaks down HBO’s hotly-anticipated fantasy series.
When Game of Thrones premieres Sunday, it will mark nearly two and a half years since HBO first ordered the pilot. The sprawling fantasy series, based on the best-selling “A Song of Fire and Ice” book series by George R.R. Martin, tells the story of the noble Stark family after patriarch Eddard (Sean Bean) becomes the king’s right-hand man.
In a clip below hinting at what's likely to come, Eddard faces off with Queen
Cersei Baratheon's (Lena Headey) hotshot twin brother, Jaime Lannister
(Nikolaj Coster-Waldau).
The Hollywood Reporter takes a look inside Game of Thrones:
$50 million-$60 million: The estimated budget for the series.
4.5 million-plus: Number of books in print in North America alone. (Once Dragons is published in July, that number will jump to more than 5 million.)
$2.5 million-plus: The amount episodes are fetching overseas. (It’s already HBO’s best-selling series abroad more than 50 percent above the international price tag for The Sopranos.)
3,188: Number of pages in the U.S. hardbacks of Books 1-4. (Swords ran longest at 973 pages.)
1,800: Rough number of vocabulary words in the Dothraki’s language. (The language of the nomadic warriors was created by Language Creation Society member David J. Peterson, who analyzed the books and drew from Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili.)
583: The crew at its biggest.
294: Number of weeks between the publishing of Books 4 and 5. (Crows was published Nov. 8, 2005; Dragons will be released July 12.)
250: Approximate number of extras used on the biggest day of production.
170: Total production days. (The production spent 133 days filming in Belfast and 37 in Malta. The crew shot simultaneously in Northern Ireland and Malta for six weeks. Some basic sets from the feature film Your Highness, which filmed before Thrones, were recycled from The Paint Hall Studio in Belfast, where the Titanic was originally painted.)
162: Total number of speaking roles in the series. (Seventeen cast members’ names appear during the opening credits.
150: Number of full sets of armor created for the series.
130: Number of helmets created for the series. (The wardrobe department consists of roughly 80 people, including the in-house costume design team who created the majority of the costumes.)
10: Number of days Thrones-themed food trucks stopped in New York and Los Angeles. (Menu items included lemon cake, trout, squab and pickled egg.)
7: Number of books in the series.
6: Number of family trees included in the HBO press kit.
5: Number of topless women in the pilot.
4: Number of beheadings in the pilot.
3: Number of beheadings before the opening credits.
3: Number of times “winter is coming” mentioned in the pilot (first one comes at the 11-minute mark).
2: Number of sex scenes in the pilot.
2: Number of roles recast. (Lady Catelyn Stark and Princess Daenerys Targaryen; the parts wound up going to Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke, respectively.)
Too many to count: Number of guys who look like Harry Potter’s Hagrid.
