Ten years of Game of Thrones: 'it helped put Malta on people's radar'

Game of Thrones is celebrating its 10th birthday today but 11 years ago, when season one was shot in Malta, no one could have imagined it would grow into a global TV phenomenon. The HBO mega-series soon had fans travelling across the world to visit filming locations. At its humble beginnings, the source material was a popular novel series with a huge cult following. But beyond that, there was none of the hype later associated with the brand, the Malta Film Commission (MFC) said. Most of the actors, with the exception of Sean Bean, were still relatively unknown. The same cannot be said of Jason Momoa, Emilia Clark and Maisie Williams today. Fast-forward to the end of the eighth series, aired in 2019, and viewership had reached 207 countries, with 19.3 million people tuning in live for the final episode in the US alone, according to HBO.  Today, the MFC can say Game of Thrones is possibly the one production, apart from Popeye’s Sweethaven, that puts Malta on the screen tourism map, much the same as Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand. Its fans are so keen to visit locations of the series that Ireland, Iceland, Croatia, Spain and Morocco had all experienced a surge in tourism...