Image via HBO
The Last of Us’s first season finale attracted the program’s largest audience to date.
HBO’s Sunday night finale averaged 8.2 million viewers across all platforms, a modest increase from the previous week’s 8.1 million and a season-high on the first night of the nine-episode run. The Last of Us’ first six episodes have averaged 30.4 million viewers since its Jan. 15 launch, with the first episode approaching 40 million viewers, according to HBO.
The Last of Us is bigger than House of the Dragon, which had an average cross-platform audience of 29 million over its run in the late summer and fall of 2022, if the 30.4 million figure holds as additional returns come in for the final three episodes.
Compared to the 4.7 million viewers that tuned in for the series premiere in January, the 8.2 million viewers for Sunday’s finale are up 74.5 percent. The bulk of viewers of the program watch it on HBO Max: Only around 12% of the total first-night viewers for the program (846,000 of 6.84 million through episode eight), excluding the episode that aired on Super Bowl Sunday (which was streamed two days early), tuned in at 9 p.m. on the primary HBO cable channel. While some of the total is made up of DVR and on-air reruns, HBO Max is where the majority of people are tuning in.
Although the last season of Game of Thrones averaged more than 44 million people during its run in 2019, The Last of Us’ cumulative audience of 30.4 million is the highest for any HBO series (its seventh season in 2017 came in at 32.5 million viewers). Thrones ended a year before HBO Max launched, and its audience leaned slightly more toward the cable channel: About 27% of its overall audience (just under 12 million) watched the show’s initial airings on the linear channel, with the remaining viewers coming from replays, DVR, and the outlet’s then-current streaming services, HBO Go and HBO Now.