At a press roundtable ahead of the premiere, the cast of House of the Dragon was asked to define the new season in a single word. Olivia Cooke, who plays Queen Alicent Hightower, said “war.” Matt Smith, as the rogue prince Daemon Targaryen, offered “blood.” Fabien Frankel, the knight Criston Cole, added “chaos,” “death,” “family tragedy” and “corruption.” The litany, reported by CNN Brasil, was not promotional hyperbole but a plain statement of what awaits when the third season arrives on HBO this Sunday. After two seasons of slow-burn court machinations, the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons is about to leave the council chamber and take to the skies in earnest.

The season opens with the Battle of the Gullet, a naval engagement drawn from George R.R. Martin’s source material that took four years to plan and shoot. Showrunner Ryan Condal has called the episode “the craziest chapter in the history of television,” a claim carried by Spanish-language outlets from Argentina to Mexico. The production’s scale, he told the Mexican newspaper El Norte, stunned even Kevin de la Noy, a producer who worked on James Cameron’s Titanic. “He said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’” Condal recounted. “But that film was one ship against an iceberg. Here it’s something like 40 Velaryon ships against 90 ships of the Triarchy.” The sequence is designed to answer a demand that has shadowed the series since its second season: a hunger for the kind of spectacular, large-scale violence that defined the later years of Game of Thrones.

That hunger had curdled into frustration for part of the audience. Brazilian outlet UOL noted that the second season, aired two years ago, was seen by many fans and critics as “dragged out and aimless.” The decision to end the season on a tense calm rather than a promised battle irritated viewers and, unusually, the author himself. Martin published a blog post criticising changes made by Condal, warning they would cause “unavoidable problems” down the line. He later deleted the post and told The Hollywood Reporter that Condal had stopped listening to his suggestions. Condal, speaking to Entertainment Weekly, said Martin had become unreasonable. The cast, interviewed at a convention in Mexico, insisted the rift had not affected the third season. “The media exaggerated it compared to what really happened,” Cooke said. Smith added that Martin had always been “very open and generous” with the actors, though he admitted he would like more input into his own character’s arc.

The return of the dragons is accompanied by an unusual commercial manoeuvre. HBO Max has cut the price of its annual subscription plans by 40 percent in the United States and is offering equivalent discounts in markets such as Mexico, where the yearly “Platino” tier drops to the equivalent of $239 pesos a month. The promotion, available through mid-July, is a transparent bid to convert monthly subscribers into annual ones and reduce churn, a strategy industry analysts note can lower cancellation rates from over 5 percent to under 2 percent. It also positions the platform for a year that will include the first live-action DC series, Lanterns, and a new Harry Potter adaptation at Christmas. For now, however, the immediate test is whether the Targaryen saga can recapture the sense of awe that once made its predecessor a global phenomenon.

Condal has described the dragons as nuclear weapons, a metaphor that sharpens the stakes of the coming battles. “If someone makes a mistake or overreaches, civilisation could come to an end,” he said. The image of 130 wooden ships locked in combat beneath fire-breathing beasts, a scene that took half a decade to realise, is the series’ wager that spectacle and dread can still pull the world to the screen.