Amazon’s New ‘Vikings Meet Game of Thrones’ Epic Officially Sets Release Date in Explosive New Trailer

Television keeps trying to find the next Game of Thrones in dragons and spin-offs, but the genre that has arguably come closest to replicating that show’s mix of dynastic scheming and battlefield carnage is the Viking drama. Michael Hirst more or less proved the formula works back in 2013, when Vikings turned a History Channel gamble into a six-season phenomenon that outlived most of its prestige competition and spawned the Netflix sequel series Valhalla.

It was Hirst’s knack for treating semi-legendary Norse figures as political animals, people whose family feuds happened to reshape kingdoms. Since Vikings ended, the space has felt noticeably vacant, with Valhalla wrapping in 2024 and nothing of comparable scale stepping in. Finally, at New York Comic Con on Friday, Prime Video debuted the first teaser trailer for Bloodaxe, Hirst’s new Norse saga, and confirmed that all eight episodes of Season 1 will premiere on Jan. 20, 2027.

The announcement came out of a panel moderated by Nerdist’s Rotem Rusak, where Hirst appeared alongside his co-showrunner and son Horatio Hirst and cast members Xavier Molyneux, Jessica Madsen and Levi Miller, discussing the series publicly for the first time. The teaser itself leans into the house style Hirst established over a decade ago, mud and steel and torchlit halls, though the key art and footage suggest a somewhat grander canvas than early Vikings had, which tracks given this is an Amazon MGM production rather than a basic cable experiment. The subject matter is also a tidy piece of continuity for longtime fans.

Erik Bloodaxe was historically a son of Harald Fairhair, the unifier of Norway who appeared across several seasons of Vikings, so Hirst is essentially picking up the next generation of the same dynastic story he left off, even if the shows aren’t formally connected. Molyneux, previously of Neighbours, plays Erik, with Bridgerton’s Jessica Madsen as his wife Gunnhild, a figure the sagas remember as the Mother of Kings and arguably the more fascinating historical character of the pair. Norse tradition paints Gunnhild as a schemer of near-mythic proportions, which is presumably where the Game of Thrones comparisons start earning their keep.

The season charts the couple’s fight for the Norwegian throne as rival claimants, foreign kings, and at least one powerful English ruler get pulled into the conflict, with Miller playing Erik’s half-brother Haakon the Good, the man history records as his great rival. The supporting cast runs deep, including Kārlis Arnolds Avots as the saga poet Egil Skallagrimsson, Rod Hallett as King Athelstan of Wessex, Jesper Christensen as the aging Harald Fairhair and Alina Tomnikov in a dual role as a shield-maiden and a mystical Seer, a device that suggests Hirst hasn’t abandoned the visionary strangeness that gave Vikings its texture.

Perhaps the strongest signal here is Amazon’s confidence. The streamer renewed Bloodaxe for a second season back in June, months before anyone outside the production had seen a frame, and Season 2 is already shooting in Ireland. Hirst said at the time:

“As the writers and showrunners of Bloodaxe, Horatio and I are very excited to announce that Amazon have also already commissioned a second season of our new Norse saga for Prime Video, which begins shooting in Ireland within a few weeks.”

Early renewals aren’t a guarantee of quality, and Amazon has placed big bets on launch-window spectacle before with mixed results. Still, a January release in over 240 countries with all episodes dropping at once positions this as the platform’s first genuine event series of 2027, and the pedigree is hard to argue with.