Italy’s ‘Gomorrah’ Season 3 Premiere Breaks Country's TV Ratings Records

The mafia series even bested the highly anticipated seventh season premiere of ‘Game of Thrones.'

It’s no secret that Sky Italia’s Gomorrah has been a huge hit for the network, but the latest season debut has smashed all previous records. Over one million viewers tuned in Friday to watch the season three premiere, the highest-ever bow for a series on Sky.

This is almost double the 572,000 spectators who watched the highly anticipated seventh season premiere of Game of Thrones in Italy. With numbers reaching the levels of the Champions League finale, the debut proved that Gomorrah might just be the one thing Italians love as much as soccer.

Inspired by the best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah is a gritty drama that delves deep into the violent politics of the Camorra mafia. Season two ended on a hair-raising cliffhanger, and audiences were eager to pick up on the season-three story, which unfolds as an all-out war between the families.

Many fans couldn’t even wait for the Friday debut. Sky bowed the first two episodes in theaters on Tuesday and Wednesday through its Vision Distribution in a new experiment that disrupted any type of theatrical window. Incredibly, the episodes were No. 1 at the box office, with revenues on Tuesday five times that of Thor: Ragnarok. In just two days, the theatrical screening made $579,900.

“These results show that there is an opportunity to create new revenue streams and a collaboration that can benefit all the industry: from the TV production industry to the exhibitors,” said Andrea Scrosati, executive vp programming at Sky Italia. “If a show that will air in three days on pay TV is at the same time on top of the movie box office, it is clear that — when you have the right product — it is time to approach windowing rules in a completely new and innovative way.”

Gomorrah is an original production of Sky Italia, Cattleya and Fandango, in association with Beta Film. The third season was directed by Claudio Cupellini and Francesca Comencini, and written by Leonardo Fasoli, Maddalena Ravagli and Ludovica Rampoldi. The cast includes Marco D'Amore, Salvatore Esposito, Cristiana Dell'Anna, Cristina Donadio, Arturo Muselli, Loris De Luna, Fabio De Caro, Ivana Lotito and Gianfranco Gallo.

The series has been distributed in 190 countries in total, proving global interest in Italian content. Sundance TV, which has aired the first two seasons, has also picked up the third season of Gomorrah for the U.S.