Could ‘Westworld’ season 2 achieve ‘Game of Thrones’ level of success?

There are many times when we feel like it’s never good to make direct comparisons between one show and another, and for good reason: You don’t want to set up a program to fail, especially a particularly-good one, with a comparison that is really not fair in any sense of the word.

Yet, at the same exact time it’s a little bit different when there are people involved who are interested in making said comparison for themselves. That’s where we are right now with “Westworld,” which just concluded its first season on HBO, and the comparisons to “Game of Thrones.” While speaking at the Credit Suisse Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Phoenix this past week, Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara laid out (per Variety) the following super-bold statement:

“I am really, really excited about the opportunity that we potentially have with ‘Westworld.’ If you look at the viewer data on ‘Westworld,’ its first year viewing on all platforms is greater than ‘Game of Thrones.’ I am not saying it’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ I am not saying it’s going to be ‘Game of Thrones.’ But if gives you a context of where it sits this first year that just finished this week.”

As Tsujihara himself notes, he is mostly speaking hypothetically here and realizes that there is no indication that “Westworld” premieres for season 2 and is suddenly on its way to becoming the biggest hit in the history of HBO. That probably won’t happen, especially since we don’t think that “Westworld” has the same exact sort of mass-market appeal. Yet, at the same exact time we do believe very much that there is an opportunity here for this show to become a really incredible hit even beyond where it was for most of the first season, where it can have people theorizing and talking about precisely every twist and turn that it puts viewers through for a rather-long time.