Spring is finally here, yet people all around the world have much more to look forward to than spending their days in the warm weather. Don’t go any further than your couch and television, as the highly anticipated final season of the excellently rated, fantasy drama television series “Game of Thrones” flies onto screens starting on Sunday, April 14th from show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and HBO.

The series began on June 9, 2011 and has since gained wide appeal. The unique and enthralling aspect of the show, is that it spirals through various concentric storylines. It allows fans to get a solid and gratifying character arc for almost every character in the massive cast. This allows them to get more attached to each character and follow the story until the end.

The series respectable seven season run only become more popular and expensive as it went on, and will rock the world for the six weeks with six of the most prolific, exhilarating, and visually pleasing episodes so far in season eight. According to E! News, when the show first started off, each episode had roughly a six million dollar budget.

Back in the first season, the show runners didn’t need to encompass such a large scale, but as the show went on, viewership had skyrocketed and HBO began to provide more funding, raising the episodic price tag to about 10 million for season six and now a whopping 15 million for season eight, according to Variety. This means bigger battles, blockbuster level special effects on show elements like dragons and magic and longer episodes. The usual one-hour episodic runtime will continue for the first three episodes of the season before it climbs to about 80 minutes each for the final three.

This cultural effect that long-running franchises like “Game of Thrones,” and even “Marvel,” create as they draw nearer to their conclusions is fairly rare in the entertainment industry. Only in the last few years have films began consistently grossing hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars and shows began pulling in viewership in the tens of millions.

In comparison with a close relative of this industry, the sports industry, which provides fans with many spectacular annual events such as the Super Bowl and World Series, the entertainment industry has never seen such a showing of deeply entranced fans as it will see in April of this year, and following up in December.

With “Game of Thrones,” fans have been invested with their favorite characters for eight years and will finally get to see what becomes of their story arc in a climactic seven-hour epic, now a with cinematic scope, appeal and special effects. This is the Super Bowl for fans of the show, following a rewarding eight-year season.

And, much like the Super Bowl, this show-capping season creates an environment of celebration that entices even those who aren’t fans of the show. Only a few franchises are able to pull this kind of event off, and given the number of colossal franchise closers this year, such as “Star Wars Episode IX” and “Avengers: Endgame” it likely won’t be duplicated after this year.

As all men must die, all good franchises must also go, but to live through with them until the end is something else entirely and where the most satisfaction is garnered and entertainment value is found.