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Successful scheming in House of the Dragon requires having several backup plans—and when it comes to real-life dragons, it’s no different.
As part of its global campaign for House of the Dragon, HBO and Max put a 270-foot installation of Vhagar—the biggest dragon in the show—on top of the Empire State Building just ahead of the series’ Season 2 premiere on June 16.
“It was the first time anything like that had been done before at that scope and scale,” Pia Barlow, evp of originals marketing at HBO and Max, told ADWEEK. “That was super exciting and also very nerve-racking.”
According to Barlow, the Empire State Building was onboard after a proposal alongside agency Giant Spoon: “In the initial meetings, it was said, ‘This is fucking crazy, but I love your ambition. You figure out how to do it. We’re game.’”
To pull it off, HBO and Max enlisted “tons of experts, specialists and engineers,” according to Barlow. The dragon was fabricated by Bigger Than Life Advertising, whose president, Mark Bachman, was a manager on the Empire State Building’s famous 1983 King Kong installation.
Of course, not everything went to plan.
“You should have seen some of the war rooms. Like, ‘Hey, what’s the weather report today?’” Barlow said. “I know so much about low-pressure and high-pressure systems.”
House of the Dragon’s Season 2 campaign is all about fans choosing their sides, either the black banners for Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) or green banners for King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), with landmarks around the world going to one side or the other. And according to Barlow, the original plan was to have Vhagar go up on the building the weekend before the premiere when cast members were visiting the Empire State Building and lighting it green to claim it for King Aegon.
That didn’t happen.
