Westworld has become Sky Atlantic’s most successful new series debut, eclipsing both Game of Thrones and Fortitude in its first week.

A total of 1.84 million people have watched the sci-fi series since its launch on 4 October. The previous biggest series premiere on the channel, Fortitude, drew 1.74 million in its first week, and episode one season one of Game of Thrones was seen by 1.45 million.

Westworld is set in a hedonistic theme park populated by lifelike androids and is based on the 1973 film by Michael Crichton which starred Yul Brynner as a murderous robot cowboy.

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The remake boasts an all-star cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Evan Rachel Wood and Ed Harris, and counts Star Trek and Star Wars: Force Awakens director JJ Abrams among its executive producers.

The show has also been a hit in the US, providing HBO with the largest premiere audience since the first series of True Detective with 3.3 million viewers across all devices. It has also received a largely positive critical response on both sides of the Atlantic, and was described by the Guardian as “a seamless marriage of western and dystopian sci-fi corporate thriller”.

However, in an indication of how rapidly viewing habits are changing, the bulk of Westworld’s viewers tuned in after it was first broadcast either recorded or on-demand, with just 448,000 watching live. The total number of viewers for Westworld in the first week is likely to increase further as Sky’s Now TV and and Sky Go app are not included in the catchup figures.

In contrast, almost half of those who watched the first ever episode of Game of Thrones in 2011 did so on launch night, while 722,000 caught Fortitude live when it began in January 2015.

Sky Atlantic director Zai Bennett said: “With an A-list cast, incredible visual effects and a storyline that gets you immediately hooked, it’s great to see that so many of our customers are enjoying Westworld as much as we are.”

Though the launch of Westworld will prove heartening for Sky, it still has some way to go before it proves it can become a successor to Game of Thrones, which is to end in 2018 after two more seasons.

The finale of the sixth season of the fantasy drama was watched by 3.6 million in the week after it aired, and the series as a whole averaged around 5 million viewers an episode once watching on all platforms was taken into account.