How Game of Thrones Turned Tv’s Most Complicated Drama into Viral Posters

Game of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are known for their meticulous attention to detail. It should come as no surprise, then, that they’re very involved in the creation of the posters — or key art, in Hollywood parlance — that promote each season of their show. “We’re very invested in the key art, and everything else HBO’s brilliant marketing team does, because we know that image will be the face of the season going forward, probably for as long as anyone watches the show,” Benioff and Weiss told Vulture earlier this week via email.

In theory, creating those Thrones posters shouldn’t have been much of a challenge: With so much spectacle baked into every episode — dragons! Zombies! Sword fights! — there’s never been a shortage of compelling visuals. And yet GOT’s unprecedented creative ambition is exactly why it’s sometimes been hard to figure out how to fit a slew of narrative themes into one poster. “You’re going through a tremendously reductive process,” says HBO program marketing chief Zach Enterlin. “Every season, the richest visuals in the world have to boil down to a single image.”

Cracking the code for each season meant early and frequent collaboration between HBO and the team of Benioff, Weiss, and executive producer Carolyn Strauss. “We communicate with those guys a lot in the lead-up to each season,” Benioff and Weiss said in their email. As for specifics, Enterlin says the process was “pretty identical” from season to season. “Campaigns, in terms of the creative process, would start while a season was still in production. There was a very candid conversation [where] we’d get a sense of the season, and the core ideas and themes [from] Dan and David and Carolyn,” he says. “We’d then work through those ideas on our side, and would share back with them. It was a very iterative process.”

While that did often take a bit of back-and-forth, sometimes, per Benioff and Weiss, landing on the right concept for a poster was remarkably simple. “They very often [got] a hole in one,” the duo said. “Season three, season five, season seven — all of those pieces of key art came to us pretty much fully baked.” As the beginning of the end for Game of Thrones gets underway Sunday, here’s a season-by-season look at how HBO and the show’s producers settled on the winning images.

Season 1

The very first Game of Thrones poster had to walk a tricky line: It needed to get fans of George R.R. Martin’s best-selling novels excited about an adaptation, while also convincing longtime HBO subscribers that the network of The Sopranos or Deadwood hadn’t lost its mind. “There was a lot of discussion on, ‘How do we sell a fantasy series to an HBO audience that isn’t traditionally accustomed to it?’” Enterlin says. Key to this, he says, was figuring out a piece of art that would be “really grounded in the central theme of the series — the battle for the throne — and a real powerful character.” The network and producers settled on an image of Ned Stark (Sean Bean) atop the Iron Throne, warily gazing down with sword in hand. “It’s cinematic and darkly dramatic, and I think suggestive of fantasy but accessible to a broader audience,” Enterlin says.

As audiences would soon discover, putting a specific character at the center of the first poster was also foreshadowing. “We definitely all wanted to put across the idea that Ned was at the center of the story, the way Don Corleone is at the center of The Godfather or Tony is at the center of The Sopranos,” Benioff and Weiss emailed. “It firmly establishes the very thing George’s book so expertly undercuts: the assumption that heroes have some kind of divine dispensation and are immune from catastrophe.” Making Ned the star of the first poster “ultimately made the rug-pull of his death that more compelling,” Enterlin adds. “We were doubling down from moment one: This is the show that would do the unexpected.”

The first poster also contains more copy than those for future seasons. There’s the tagline (“You Win or You Die,” which Enterlin says framed “the stakes of the show in a very accessible way”) plus an on-the-nose explanation of what the program is (“An Epic New Series”), along with the full day, date, and time of the premiere, along with a reminder the show is available “Only on HBO.” While the result is a slightly busier poster, “that’s part and parcel of introducing an audience to the show,” Enterlin says. “As the show became more mature, there was less of a need for additional copy and language to make the point for us.”

Season 2

While GOT’s inaugural season did well in the ratings, it wasn’t quite yet a Nielsen blockbuster. Enterlin and his team wanted to continue to use the poster art as a pitch to audiences who hadn’t yet hopped onboard the franchise. They decided to distill the season’s theme to an image (a man’s hand grabbing at a crown) and tagline (“War is Coming”) easily grasped even by folks who had no idea what the words Game of Thrones meant. “We were trying to help our audience wrap their arms around the show, and remind them and potential new viewers that despite this very vast world, there was a truly singular focus on a battle for the crown,” Enterlin says. Once again, the elements worked on a deeper level for fans who’d read Martin’s books. “It also coincided with the second novel in the series, A Clash of Kings [and] very simply set up this idea of impending war,” he explains. The tagline, meanwhile, played on a phrase familiar to loyal fans (“Winter Is Coming”) while “promising action” to a broader audience, Enterlin adds.