House of the Dragon Finale Leaks

Television

Thirty minutes of next week’s House of the Dragon finale were leaked on TikTok Tuesday night by a user who has now been banned. However, the 14 clips have surfaced on Twitter and Reddit, already having amassed between 50,000 and 100,00 views on TikTok before being removed. It only took TikTok three hours to ban the user and remove the content. The show airs on Sunday nights, so these leaks were five days early, giving people potentially almost a week to see/hear or avoid the spoilers.

House of the Dragon’s season 1 finale was leaked online two days before its premiere in October 2022, caused by a distribution partner in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East, HBO said at the time. No one has officially commented on these season 2 finale leaks, though Variety has asked both HBO and TikTok for comment. Leaks like this weren’t uncommon for Game of Thrones, especially during season 8, with full episodes sometimes showing up on illegitimate and official sites alike ahead of airtime. DirecTV and Amazon Prime Germany made Game of Thrones episodes available before they aired in the final season.

Well, great. I’ve already been dodging Deadpool & Wolverine spoilers, and I saw this past week’s House of the Dragon late, so I was worried about that for about a day, too. I think with streaming services, screener copies, partnerships like HBO on Prime, etc., this may be unavoidable. HBO didn’t provide screeners of this episode specifically to avoid such leaks, and we can see how well that worked. It’s a commendable step, but somehow, almost half of the episode got out anyway. I hate spoilers and try not to spoil things for others, but even if we set aside technical problems and accidental uploads, there are those among us who spoil things purposely for fun. So far, I’ve only seen one potential spoiler for the finale, which is something quite basic, so I’m not too worried about that.

It’s unrealistic to expect people to stay off the internet to avoid these leaks, which is always one of the first arguments I hear. “Stay offline,” “Don’t open Facebook,” etc. People aren’t going to do that, myself included. I have to use the internet for various things, and I also choose to use it for entertainment and communication. I imagine many others can say the same. If I’m worried about spoilers for a specific thing, I just try to scroll away as soon as I see something related to that topic. This doesn’t always work, and at times, I forget to avoid all Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon content, for example. This is a particularly bad case since it’s half of an episode, not just small snippets or the whole episode. Honestly, if it was the whole thing, I might have watched it just to make sure I didn’t get spoiled. Of course, I would still watch it properly on Sunday. I don’t use TikTok at all, and I look at Twitter and Reddit sparingly, but this could be very difficult for a lot of fans to avoid. I can only assume it has or will spread to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. I’m aware this is a first-world problem, and there are way more pressing matters than TV spoilers at the moment. But it is nice to go into something relatively blind and perhaps be surprised sometimes.

But what’s your stance on leaks and spoilers? Do you seek it out, try to avoid it, or do you not care at all? Have you seen these leaked clips? Let us know in the comments, but no spoilers, please!