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Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
For all that money wasted on politically correct elves and dwarven maidens, they could have filmed 10 seasons of "The Expanse", "Firefly", or some other new show.
- Miner49er 4y ago
  Being black is now called "politically correct"? Why not just say black?
  - sn0w_crash 4y ago
    I think they mean having to hit a certain quota of ethnicities of people. LOTR has been very vocal about how “diverse and inclusive” this production is.
    - drill_tulips 4y ago
  - bergenty 4y ago
    It’s not just about race, all the women are masculine. Where is the beauty, where is femininity.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Or a real diverse series based on a diverse book series which never spent a dime on reminding everyone how diverse they are. Eg The Expanse.
madaxe_again 4y ago
Man, half a billion dollars on an entertainment product - that money could be poured into something useful, like space. We shouldn’t be spending money on earthly delights until we’ve fixed all the problems in space. What practical applications have hobbits given us, anyway?
- baud147258 4y ago
  > What practical applications have hobbits given us second breakfast, for one
anshumankmr 4y ago
Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested. And the "internet" really reacted negatively to the trailer as well. (I personally didn't hate the trailer myself but after having watched the original trilogy and the first Hobbit movie, I was feeling a bit underwhelmed cause it didn't do a good job selling the show to me.) So it really remains to be seen whether it will be a hit when it does to go to streaming.
- oblio 4y ago
  > Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested. Probably all of the above plus it's a long term move. Amazon needs to build up a strong catalog and marquee TV shows are long term attractions. As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s. Game of Thrones would have been the exact thing but D&D completely tore it apart in the last 2 seasons.
  - anshumankmr 4y ago
    I don't know. 465 million seems still steep for 8 episodes TV show. I am all for it cause Disney has seemingly skimped on their CG budget for their newer shows. So more competition means more TV shows will have film quality production. But it is a concern, if their show costs more than something like Avengers: Endgame which had some of the biggest actors in Hollywood involved in addition to the probably insane VFX budget. Obviously COVID would have affected the budget for the show, but I have a feeling that it went way over budget than was initially intended. Although I agree with the marquee concept. HBO had their own marquee show: Game of Thrones, though it produced a lot of quality stuff like the Pacific, Band of Brothers, Sopranos etc that can be watched for years to come. Game of Thrones on the other hand was a big disappointment for the fans and its negative reception probably made HBO wonder what they would do after it was over (hence the Targaryen origin show and the Jon Snow series are being developed... personally I'm skipping both)
addicted 4y ago
I’m not so sure the LOTR series is ideal for expansion. It feels like Peter Jackson has already tackled all the really interesting parts of the LOTR world.
- oblio 4y ago
  Tolkien created a lot of content, an entire fantasy universe. With good storytelling there's a lot more to tell. If Star Wars, which let's be frank here, is a 2 bit creation compared to Tolkien's works, managed to become a multi billion dollar franchise, then the LotR world should be able to do the same, if it's managed wisely.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    But then Star Wars was envisaged as a series of films and the sequels and prequels are part of a directly related story with overlapping characters and pacing, with the original creators around to give it their blessing and the occasional bit of creative input. Fans can overlook a lot of shoddiness to see C3PO again or how Darth became Darth. The forging of rings or founding of Rivendell, not so much, and I think the story of how Gollum became Gollum is off limits to the series too. The Amazon LOTR proposal is basically some new fantasy stories set in a different millennium from the LOTR world which loosely tie in with some chronologies Tolkien wrote as lore rather than narrative, with a license which prevents them from reinterpreting events from the LOTR/Hobbit books from a Tolkien Estate that isn't exactly keen on giving the series canonical status. Instead of hobbits from the Shire and kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor under threat - all places that don't exist, never mind the characters - we've got a blank slate fantasy civilisations called Numenor and Eregion (which will resemble LOTR in the same way most high fantasy civilisations tend to) and a pretty loose narrative arc which implies the bad guy eventually destroying them. The output might be very good stories in their own right, or it might be bland as hell, but the hardcore Tolkien fanbase is going to be hard to please. Create a series of episodes purporting to show the full history of the Second Age and it'll be [probably correctly] accused of being disjointed and completely lacking Tolkien's epic storytelling skill; create a compelling quest narrative involving dwarves and hobbits and it'll be accused of discarding Tolkien's actual histories in favour of a cheap knockoff of his plot structure. I mean, a licensee could probably randomly choose a third rate LOTR fanfic plot and sell millions of tickets to watch it, but that doesn't necessary mean its a good idea from a creative standpoint.
oaiey 4y ago
They should have taken 100M of that and fund the remaining three seasons of The Expanse.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  This would have been great! Allthough, as far as I heard, one of the reasons for stopping was the time jump in the books (full disclosure: I didn't read the books).
  - oaiey 4y ago
    There is a time jump. But come on, put some gray hair on and some makeup.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that we've not seen the end of The Expanse's universe.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Yeah, what was with that planet with the alien dog thing?
    - jffry 4y ago
      I don't want to spoil too much, but that was basically the entirety of a novella which is the beginning of a plot line relevant to the final 3 books in the series. I don't know why they would include it if they don't have plans on continuing the show in some form in the future. It's not like there was any shortage of content in the mainline story to cover.
  - hedora 4y ago
    I hope you're right, but they had an entire scene in the last episode where the main characters complained at Bezos for cutting off funding. This is not the mark of a show that they plan to renew. :-(
albertopv 4y ago
I hope it'll be better than The Wheel of Time, not that it takes much...
elias94 4y ago
I doubt anything interesting will came out from that expensive series. They're doing it for the money, not for the product. And that as always be a clear indicator of a low quality product.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
marie1595 4y ago
[dead]
chrisseaton 4y ago
> New Zealand, where the show is shooting I think they’ve switched to England and Wales haven’t they? Which is probably closer to the author’s inspirations (Tolkien never set foot in New Zealand.)
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  > Which is probably closer to the author’s inspirations (Tolkien never set foot in New Zealand.) Yes. A youthful walking holiday in the Alps was also a source of inspiration.
usrname 4y ago
Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good. bezzzos bezzosn my bezzzos
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Just like Melkor creating the orcs...
- bergenty 4y ago
  Please no YouTube tier comments.
  - Reubachi 4y ago
    This is a reference to LOTR creationism/lore.
prepend 4y ago
Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t anything remarkable and seem to have just done other Amazon shows. Of course there are video projects done by unknowns that turn out great (Jackson had done Heavenly Creatures and Frighteners and a few others before LOTR), but I was kind of hoping there’d be some creative team who is really into Tolkien who tells great stories. Also, I don’t recognize the actors at all. Like not a single one. Compared to LOTR, they didn’t rely on stars but they had Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Viggo Mortenson, Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett. It seems strange to not have anyone. I thought this was a cost cutting effort, but that doesn’t make sense if $465M. I worry that this is Amazon saying “cost is no limit” to a project team instead of artists and creators.
- cgeier 4y ago
  While I'm not particularly looking forward to this series, having rather unknown actors isn't putting me off at all. And why shouldn't they go with directors they are happy with? TV series often have a lot of different directors, often directing just a single episode of a season or even a series.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    TV series are often bad though. You can often see drastic dips in episode quality. Do they really know what they’re doing with these directors?
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    The budget-talent-ratio just seems off. Usually, movies spend a lot of money on hiring talent, which here clearly isn't the case here. So the question is where is that money going. Grandparent and I are afraid that we end with something graphically completely overproduced and no story. Also, if you provide a junior engineer with a few million, you can't expect perfect software, even with that budget. Same reservations apply here.
darkerside 4y ago
From reading the article, $200M was for the rights alone, and NZ is rebating 25% so it comes out to more like 150M net on production of the actual show.
- framapotari 4y ago
  No, the NZ rebate is based on production costs, which doesn't count funds spent on purchasing the rights to a project.
- wasmitnetzen 4y ago
  Sounds to me like it's rather $665M in total, with a rebate of $116M.
AzzieElbab 4y ago
Cool. And if the series flop it will trigger some major review to modern movie/tv making
- layer8 4y ago
  It may not happen with this series, because too many will probably still watch it even if it’s terrible, but it’s bound to happen for some franchise at some point, and maybe things will get interesting then.
  - AzzieElbab 4y ago
    Last interesting sci-fi show I watched was The Expanse, it was on Prime. One may hope.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  Maybe, but I’m skeptical. The TV/Streaming space seems flush with cash and several high budget series have flopped or otherwise significantly underperformed without an industry wide reflection or reaction. I suspect it is because these streaming service owners are desperate to build big content libraries rather than produce high quality shows.
theplumber 4y ago
Let's hope they won't turn it into a diversity thing checking all the boxes and loosing the plot
- usrn 4y ago
  I think that ship already sailed.
- alldayeveryday 4y ago
  Lol, the "diversity thing" is the star of the show here as evidenced by both the media they (creators) have put out (images, etc) + by their own admission.
- tlear 4y ago
  Whole thing is The Message and nothing more
panick21_ 4y ago
After Wheel of Time my expectations are so incredibly low, if it still manages to disappoint I will be impressed. I'm expecting a shitshow and a shitstorm of epic proportions.
- pluc 4y ago
  I'm expecting a 465 million dollar joke about the ease of delivering products to Mordor using Amazon's infrastructure. If not in live action then at least as an advertising campaign based in supporting material.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Stop giving them ideas!
    - pluc 4y ago
      If the "ma" of the Amazon logo isn't modified with a pictogram of LOTR landmarks someone needs to get fired. "From A to Z through The Shire" should be their Superbowl campaign.
  - harveywi 4y ago
    Wheel of Prime
- jsmeaton 4y ago
  Yeah, Wheel of Time was really bad. I tried so hard to like it but it had little to redeem it.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  Wow I didn't even know that happened until right now. At least they're advertising for Rings of Power.
- mrwh 4y ago
  Have to agree! I'm not sure what I was expecting with Wheel of Time, but I wasn't expecting it to look so cheap. Also one of the central characters wears a pullover in early episodes that's definitely dry-clean only, and had definitely just been dry-cleaned. While it sounds like a little thing, it's the little things that add up to an immersive world.
d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
Tangential — I wish they or someone else serializes Dune. It’s so tailor made for a tv series. Also looking forward to Three Body Problem from nflx
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  >I wish they or someone else serializes Dune https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    That (and the follow-on) weren't too bad. Much better than Lynch's treatment. I must say, though, that I'm looking forward to part 2 of Villeneuve's Dune.
    - anshumankmr 4y ago
      Haven't had the time to watch it. Working my way through the book.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        It's pretty much impossible to adequately represent the books as a movie, and even a series can't really do the books justice. The new movie does a fairly decent job of translating the books to live action. The biggest disappointment, for me, in all of the treatments (including the movie), is the way the Fremen are represented. I'm a bit spoiled, as I grew up in Africa, and was familiar with tribes like the Touareg, so I know what real desert-dwellers look like. I'm pretty sure that Herbert wanted them to look like that. Hard to represent, with city-dweller, millionaire actors. Bedouin tribespeople look like dry twigs. Not much soft or fat. It would take serious self-denial to adequately represent. Willem Dafoe would probably be able to represent Stilgar (in my mind). He'd have to go on a diet, and get a tan, though.
    - MikusR 4y ago
      The miniseries and especially Children of Dune are so much better that the recent movie.
aaron695 4y ago
drumhead 4y ago
The last hurrah for web money profligacy maybe. Investors aren't going to be too happy to see so much money spent without a commensurately large return in this economic climate.
djbebs 4y ago
So much money for something that I can already tell will flop... I really don't understand why they put people who have no connection with the IP in charge of this. It's really quite sad to see such a beloved world getting an adaptation that is destroyed by poor writing and design by committee
- prox 4y ago
  World wide format demographics means we have a cookie cutter adaption that probably just plays the script as a checklist needed to be done instead of anything inspiring. How about a movie on a fictional global shopping conglomerate with a selfish CEO who doesn’t want to pay fair wages.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- layer8 4y ago
  The IP is only used for its value as a brand. There’s an argument to be made that such productions are prone to diminishing the value of the brand if they turn out to be subpar. On the other hand, mainstream consumers usually aren’t too demanding. So brands tend to get watered down to minimal viable mediocrity.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    I see that argument a lot but my thought is that people just aren't looking at a long enough time frame, I mean everyone was excited for fantastic beasts and it was considered okay, but it made a ton of money because of the brand. But then they made the second one which the general reaction to seems to be "What the HECK?" but it still had decent sells because people liked the brand and most importantly didn't realize they didn't like it until after they had seen it, now fantastic beasts 3 had incredibly low returns because all the brand had been burned at that point. I think a huge problem is that especially, in the tech sector where things move so fast, people don't realize that many things, especially societal matters can move very slowly from a human perspective. I mean everyone how many big name tech companies do you know off the top of your head that are dying now, slowly, but still making money because of inertia? Some things just take a while someone who loves something can eventually have their love of that thing burned if it goes poorly for long enough.
mabbo 4y ago
I suspect this will go down beside the Fire Phone. Amazon just sometimes gets this idea that if they spend enough money they're sure to win. I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  > I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions. I really don't get this sentiment. AWS was a loss making unit once much like any other innovative idea. Amazon funds 1000s of different ideas with the intention that few will work. If government would break up companies like this, there would be no interest in pursuing ideas by big companies and no funding for stuff which has any R and D cost.
  - mabbo 4y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but it doesn't hold water when you reach the scale of a company like Amazon, for the time periods we're talking about. The entire retail market is being undercut by Amazon Retail. Competition is being reduced to fewer and fewer competitors- which is bad for the consumer in the long run. All the while, Amazon retail can afford to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year, over and over again, because AWS makes up the difference. They can afford to build hundreds of high tech warehouses to reduce their costs further, all from the income from AWS. I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think it's okay that things are operating this way. (And lets not even get into the abuse of customers and merchants on their retail marketplace, which frankly to me are enough that the government should have intervened long ago.)
    - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
      It holds specially for company like Amazon. Do you know how many business Amazon is running on loss? AFAIK they are very liberal in spending in R and D or with long term motive. AWS was once such a project. Who would have though that companies are ready to spend 5x if you add extra services alongside the server. Also, AFAIK Amazon shopping site is not in loss in US. Your suggestion could have made sense if Amazon is using AWS money to strengthen the monopoly, but Amazon shopping is a profitable business, in part due to advertisement.
glanzwulf 4y ago
Considering there's not a single relevant main stream actor, director or writer on the team. I don't understand where they're spending the money on. Can't wait to see it, but my expectations cannot go lower
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  There’s talent out there beyond celebrities and movie stars.
  - prepend 4y ago
    There’s great talent, but they don’t command large fees. So GP’s question stands. They aren’t spending money on actors and writers, so where is the money going? That’s a lot of spirit gum.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    But that talent comes cheaper, where is this $400MM going?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Hopefully: big sets, lots of extras, on-location shooting. Probably also some internal accounting bullshit like "the Amazon home page is worth $100M as an ad placement spot".
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > Considering there's not a single relevant main stream actor, director or writer on the team. I don't understand where they're spending the money on. Honestly, I'd rather money spent on props, effects, etc. than brand-name actors. Look at Stranger Things; virtually no one famous in it.
  - glanzwulf 4y ago
    Yeah, and look at Stranger Things, it started with a 6M per episode budget and now (due to massive success and fame the actors got their share) is at 30M per episode. That means season 1 was 48M and now season 4 is at 240M.
emptyfile 4y ago
Considering how awful the Hobbit movies were I can't see how this could be worse. In any case, after the horror that was Wheel of Time, I'm not watching any Amazon fantasy shows unless they get glowing reviews (from real critics, not tech news commentators).
j_barbossa 4y ago
Media productions are daughters of their time. We currently have a situation where the elite in Hollywood are desperate to bring diversity and blackwashing into the stories. When a new LOTR series is shot in 50 years from now, this will no longer be an issue.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  As a fantasy series, it seems the ethnicities of the actors are quite irrelevant. I can understand that it can be a bit odd in historical dramas, but male actors used to play the female roles in plays. It seems pretty secondary unless the plot is explicitly about race. And historical accuracy, even in historical dramas is usually tenuous at best anyway. I’d suggest that when you say “blackwashing” people are going to take that as a signal that you have some pretty toxic politics.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I think it’s an opportunity to explain how elves and dwarves ended up with different skin colors and whatnot. It’s a good opportunity for world building. In the Hobbit movies there were some black elves and they didn’t describe anything about them. Just that there were some Black Forest elves mixed in with all the other elves. I guess it slightly distracted where every minor detail had some back story and history, but I don’t think detracted from the story. I don’t think leaving out these details was in the top 100 flaws of the Hobbit movie. As someone really into Tolkien, I’d rather see them expand or adapt the lore than just swap out details. It’s not that it’s the end of the world, but it’s dangerous to change details from someone else’s work because I never know what was the actual important piece. I suppose I could change Michaelangelo’s David’s sex but it would be hard to recreate it with the same qualia as Muchaelangelo as I’m not him. It’s not the sex of the sculpture that’s important, it’s my implementation. I’m sure Michaelangelo would have e carved an amazing woman, or African, or Asian, or any background. But few are Michaelangelo. An example of this that I think went kind of well is the Kevin Kostner Robin Hood movie where they cast Morgan Freeman and gave him a back story of being a Moor from the crusades who returned to England. I think this worked out better than if they had just randomly changed a Robin Hood character ‘a race.
wasmitnetzen 4y ago
That percentage based rebate incentivizes accounting shenanigans to make it look as expensive as possible, who knows how many salaries included in that number Amazon was paying anyway, no matter if they would have produced that show or not.
j5r5myk 4y ago
The Severance budget was over $300 million and that shot in NYC so $350 in NZ after rebate makes sense. I had heard they were spending $1 billion on the new LOTR, maybe that’s including rights and marketing
- StevePerkins 4y ago
  I'm going to need a citation on that. Sources that I read from a quick web search indicate that Apple is spending an average of $10 million per episode on its shows. How "Severance" could cost $300 million, when it takes place almost entirely on an indoor office set, defies plausibility.
  - j5r5myk 4y ago
    You are right I checked my sources and I was quite mistaken. $100 million budget is it what it landed at.
langsoul-com 4y ago
Even though the MMO got cancelled, I hope they'll make Battle for Middle Earth 3. Honestly, BFME 2 was the shit. Doubt it though, rts hasn't been the rage for a looooong time.
999900000999 4y ago
>Amazon cancels Lord of the Rings MMO video game This stood out to me, let's just say the MMO came out as well. Then the entire thing looks like a long-term investment to reinvigorate the franchise. I actually really liked the WB Game's RPGs
detritus 4y ago
Not to be That Guy, but crikey - think of all the good that could be done in the world for half a billion dollars. . Cue my usual thought about how the likes of Apple could make/break Fusion Energy (prove/disprove viability) for a small percentage of their bank balance.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  well at least i don't need to feel so guilty about all those amazon returns.
gonzo41 4y ago
Could we just get a few more seasons of the Expanse. Or Dune. C'mon people we've done this one already.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
It will flop.
the_only_law 4y ago
Good God can someone come up with a unique or at least mildly novel idea? I'm getting sick of seeing remakes and spinoffs of classic franchises or series that absolutely disrespect the originals by pumping out some garbage ass show that will somehow last longer than a season.
- rcpt 4y ago
  Chernobyl 2
  - atom058 4y ago
    Chernobyl: Fukushima
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >Chernobyl 2: Nuclear Boogaloo FTFY
tlear 4y ago
This will make last 2 seasons of GoT seem like War and Peace. That trailer.. Read books probably 5-6 times, read Silmarillion(!), watched the movies probably 10 times, even watched Hobbit twice(that was painful). Only tattoos I have are in Cirth.. I could have easily dumped thousands of bucks on merchandise and other crap together with my kids over the years if it looked even remotely decent. I am not subscribing to prime or watching this garbage.
- niek_pas 4y ago
  Claiming that this is garbage based on a single trailer seems a little premature.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    That seems like an odd take. The purpose of a trailer is for the production to make their best argument to the audience about why they should see this show. If a trailer looks good, people get hyped for the show or movie and buy tickets when the time comes. If the trailers looks like crap, most people won't watch the show or movie. The whole purpose of a trailer is for people to judge whether or not to invest more of their time and money in that production. There simply isn't enough time for people to watch everything, there is way too much media for that. And this LOTR show is going to be much longer than a typical movie, because it's a TV show. I expect 8 hours at minimum, assuming each of the 8 episodes is an hour. Expecting people to watch it before judging whether it's worth their time doesn't make any sense. Which is why trailers are made...
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It’s going to be interesting how badly this will fail _if_ they are focused on making an international success that also can be viewed in China…
ninju 4y ago
Old article...needs [2021] in title
breatheoften 4y ago
$465 million for one season of TV seems very expensive. But $465 million as part of the bootstrapping/rnd budget for some new gpu-adjacent compute offering would be pretty easy to justify ... and potentially being able to move some of the development cost associated with that new cloud offering out of aws and into some other budgetary boundary is almost certain to provide stock boosting effects. It seems obvious to me that the tech companies with streaming platforms have started using tv/movie production budgets as a way to fund research into offerings appropriate for development teams that are highly-creative/technically competent/and driven by result oriented pressure. Adding value to the production stacks used by those kinds of teams is hard but also technically worthwhile and pretty measurable. And having discerning and hard to please customers as early partners/beta testers for a new service could be very valuable. I suspect Apple is doing this kind of thing as well with their shows where you can see the same or similar high-end visual effects appearing on multiple of their shows -- feels like the kind of thing you'd expect to happen with different creative teams using converging 'in-house' tooling ...
- acomjean 4y ago
  250 Million was just licensing. So they're starting in a deep hole. Strange, Amazon seem to went the budget route for "Wheel of Time" which I enjoyed, (though popular I hadn't read any of the books). The effects were good, acting was good. But think of the product placement offerings Middle Earth offers amazon. The amazon prime delivery wagon. Alexa smart speakers were bountiful in that time as were "fire" tablets, forged from dragons breath.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    The acting in wheel of time was not good. It was bad enough to ruin the whole thing for me. Acting in high fantasy can be really tough because the rolls are commonly so different from what the actors are used to, but they did not get it done.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    An observation from an online review of WoT that I agreed with is that the writers were far more comfortable writing scenes that were not in the original material than they were adapting existing scenes from the book. This does leave one to wonder why they bothered to license the books though. It's well agreed upon that it is a difficult property to adapt to screen, and the first season is (IMO) further evidence of that. P.S. The acting was merely "okay" for me; Pike (Moiraine) absolutely nailed her part, others were more hit-or-miss (my wife who had not read the books also liked Rutherford as Perrin). I don't know if Harris did a good job, or if it's just that Mat has the most personality of any actor, but I liked him as well; either way Harris is not going to be in Season 2, so it's moot going forward.
SilverBirch 4y ago
Given the change in market dynamics around video streaming, I think there are going to be a decent number of projects like this, that no matter how good they are, stand no chance of being positive ROI anymore (if they ever were). I think a really interesting angle on this is what does Amazon do in the few years after the series comes out. They've sunk so much money into the rights for this, and it is a valuable property, but it's going to be impossible to spend similar budgets on anything new. I wonder if we're going to see a massively expensive season 1 and then simply nothing because they don't want to do a season 2 with 1/5th of the budget.
namelessoracle 4y ago
Star Wars Episode 3 was made off of 115 million to put things in perspective. Even adjusted for inflation.....
sidlls 4y ago
Hopefully it doesn't turn into the dreck that the Wheel of Time series has turned out to be. And no, I'm not referring to the garbage "anti-woke" drivel that racists have peddled about the show. I'm simply referring to the fact that the series is so far removed from the actual story that claiming the series is "based on" the books is even a stretch. It's basically a completely different story that uses the same character names and some terminology.
rr888 4y ago
> $465 million ... New Zealand ... would be rebating the production around 25% of its costs, or $116 million. So it probably cost $100 mil but Bezos found a way to get NZ taxpayers to pay for it.
- phasersout 4y ago
  That's probably closer to the truth than most other ideas... does this new Arri camera really cost 4 million a pop? hm... well could be... I'm just a Wellington tax officer...
- notatoad 4y ago
  if it was all just a scam to get NZ to pay for it, presumably they would have kept that going instead of moving production to the UK for subsequent seasons, where they get drastically less tax credits.
ReptileMan 4y ago
It can't be worse than wheel of time ... or can it?
ethagknight 4y ago
There must be some level of tax strategy across these streaming platforms to get a video series to pay for a buildout of IT infrastructure that then gets added to its general AWS service (or iCloud etc). Many US states have wildly generous film tax credits, so it’s almost conning these states into footing the bill for the next AWS data center. (Edit: NZ is paying 25% into this project as an economic and tourism generator) As others have pointed out, this is a lot of money for a series without recognizable names, so potentially the true cost of production is a very overpriced contract for digital services. The article cites “expensive costumes and elaborate sets” as a cost driver, I guess we will have to wait and see, but that seems like a cover. To quote Arrested Development, “It’s one banana, Michael! What could it cost, $10?” Nonetheless, exciting to see an updated and hopefully more approachable journey into Middle Earth. I love LOTR, but cannot get my family excited to hunker down for a 3+ hour movie compared to watching 1hr chunks of tv series.
jmyeet 4y ago
This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning: 1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical; 2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode. Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits. 3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley); 4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't. 5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good. 6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic. If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late). Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project. [1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-1-billion-1202127879/ https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-ri...
snickerbockers 4y ago
This is going to be terrible. I can't imagine the SHEER FUCKING HUBRIS modern TV writers must have of they think they can write a fanfic that stands next to Tolkien's greatest work. These writers' only experience is working on a 4th film in JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot universe which ended up getting cancelled too.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Quality doesnt matter anymore. It will get views because it has a brand attached to it and lots of people already have prime. I don't know what their break even number is but prime is fucking expensive. If this pushes 1% of people who are on the edge of buying prime and not buying prime into making that decision its a massive win for them. I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made.
  - ausbah 4y ago
    >I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made. what is the most objective judge of quality if not what people are willing to watch
    - AlwaysRock 4y ago
      I don't know. I don't think popular can be equated with good though. Love is Blind was hugely popular. It is terrible tv. The same can be said about most content. If you come up with an objective system that everyone agrees on you will be a billionaire. But anyone can tell you that popular doesnt equal good.
  - dopeboy 4y ago
    As a desperate Star Wars fan, I concur. It is a canon and world I am so bought into that I will consume substandard content. I imagine the same applies to LOTR fans.
    - azekai 4y ago
impalallama 4y ago
The Wheel of Time series was of such middling quality that I'm more skeptical of this than ever. Not that a Silmarillion tv show really has much appeal to me anyway.
0xcb0 4y ago
I'm sure people find this offensive and offtopic, but As much as I'm a LOTR fan, I really can't wrap my head around why we spend so much money on creating a fiction series while millions of people are at risk of death from hunger, thirst, and climate change. With 465$M, so many people could be saved. :(
mooreds 4y ago
Totally OT, but this kind of stuff drives me up the wall: "Now, Deadline confirms that the first season of the show will cost $465 million to produce. For comparison’s sake, Peter Jackson’s whole Lord of the Rings trilogy cost $281 million to make. For something more recent, Game of Thrones was spending around $100 million per season after it really blew up — this would be around season 6 — and spent far less in its early days." The issue is that there is no inflation adjustment. $281M was different in the 2000s than it is now. In fact, per https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $281M in Jan 2004 (the last LoTR movie was released in Dec 2003) is $443M in May 2022 dollars. Still eye popping numbers, but the costs for the series and the moves are no longer hundreds of millions of dollars apart.
softwaredoug 4y ago
I think people are burned out by prestige TV The market is flooded and there’s only so many complicated series people can keep track of at one time. It’s like trying to read a dozen book series at the same time. Years ago with shows like game of thrones, the market was more sustainable. A single show could justify a high budget and dominate cultural discussions for a while. Now the market is so streaming forward and swamped by streaming services people can’t keep up. It’s just becoming work to keep up with these shows. Not to mention the whole thing could end poorly (ie Game of Thrones) You see this in the prevalence of limited series like Queens Gambit / Obi wan. People are just happy to have a self contained story where they don’t have to work. Or they want throw away, mindless TV that they doesn’t require much deep thinking.
- acchow 4y ago
  > I think people are burned out by prestige TV Can you give some examples? I'm re-watching Westworld from the beginning now because I find most of what's out there to be boring
  - wmeredith 4y ago
    Not OP, but there's an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to scripted dramas and comedies. Apple TV+ - Severance - Ted Lasso - For All Mankind - Slow Horses HBOMax - We Own This City - Hacks - Barry - Tokyo Vice - Gentleman Jack - Peacemaker - White Lotus - Curb Your Enthusiasm - Minx - Insecure - Industry There are many more, but just on those two streamers that's a dozen+ shows that I've been really impressed by in one way or the other over the last year. And my list to watch has just as much on it. As for a direct recommendation, I highly suggest you check out Severance if you like Westworld. It's slower burn, but similarly twisty sci-fi thriller.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Westworld was good for exactly one season. I stopped watching halfway through the first episode of the second because they decided they needed to take a regular woman character and turn her into a “boss”.
jollybean 4y ago
It's basically guaranteed, that even if it's bad, it will be a huge hit. The material/fanbase is just to energetic. They and kids, at minimum, will watch it.
GenerocUsername 4y ago
It's going to flop due to perceived wokeness and pandering with changes to source material intent and vision
georgeecollins 4y ago
Production costs have gone up a lot in New Zealand after Peter Jackson put them on the map. Also, if the government is covering 25% of the costs it creates an intended incentive to spend more. People spend a lot on content because successful content is worth it. I hope this is good.
felizuno 4y ago
$465m was a pretty standard price tag for a single Ferrari/Red Bull/Merc F1 season pre-covid, and I think the merch opportunities and addressable market are probably pretty comparable
srveale 4y ago
Does anyone else find it ironic and kind of sad that Amazon, of all companies, has taken over a story about the evils of greed and lust for power, and which idolizes the simple, pastoral lifestyle above all else? There are few places less Shire-like than an Amazon warehouse.
Corrado 4y ago
I would love for this to be good, but I'm afraid it's going to follow in the footsteps of "The Shannara Chronicles". I read every single one of the "Shannara" books as well as the sub-series (Word & Void, etc.) but I watched 2 episodes of Chronicles and couldn't stand it. I don't know if it's because I had a whole look and feel for the characters in my mind's eye and the show didn't reflect that. Or maybe it was because they told a story that was similar to the books but not quite the same. Or maybe it was bad CGI and writing. Whatever it was, the show just didn't sit right with me. This LOTR series feels very similar.
mkaic 4y ago
I feel like I'm one of the only people here who's actually... quite optimistic and excited about this? Like -- I really don't see Amazon screwing this up. Bezos is a fan of the franchise and is smart enough to know that this can't be screwed up without consequences. I also think that the lack of established talent being hired is actually a good thing, because it means they looked beyond the famous names we've all heard and presumably found a whole collection of diamonds in the rough. If Bezos is willing to spend half a billion on a bunch of unknowns, I'm going to bet that those unknowns are pretty darn promising. Anyways, thought I'd counter all the pessimism here with a bit of positivity. I'm stoked for this series, and if it turns out bad after all? Oh well, they tried. It wouldn't be the end of the world.
antonymy 4y ago
This budget feels very out of whack with what we have seen of the production. No big names either in front of or behind the camera. All the recognizable credits are at the producer level, and some of those are of dubious reputation. I don't want to disparage unknown actors and crew members, but it seems awfully risky to expect them to carry this show without any veterans to rally around. I guess the logic Amazon is using is that LotR's brand is so strong it doesn't need star power, or experience, or anything else to carry it besides apparently a huge pile of money. But this seems like a really, really bold direction for a project when Amazon is still very new to producing media and they have yet to produce a single unqualified hit.
Justsignedup 4y ago
Biggest worry: I have massive doubts that this show would bring in profits similar to Avengers: End Game. Because that's what it'll take. Even if this is a smashing success by streaming standards, Season 2 will be ridiculously toned down to keep the costs down to like 50MM. People will instantly say "quality dropped significantly" and then it'll collapse. Feels like this will go the way of Marco Polo which was an amazing show, destroyed by Netflix's lack of desire to spend any money.
TedShiller 4y ago
Spending? Wasting
Cypher 4y ago
ouch, that's gonna hurt

For all that money wasted on politically correct elves and dwarven maidens, they could have filmed 10 seasons of "The Expanse", "Firefly", or some other new show.

Miner49er 4y ago
Being black is now called "politically correct"? Why not just say black?
- sn0w_crash 4y ago
  I think they mean having to hit a certain quota of ethnicities of people. LOTR has been very vocal about how “diverse and inclusive” this production is.
  - drill_tulips 4y ago
- bergenty 4y ago
  It’s not just about race, all the women are masculine. Where is the beauty, where is femininity.
oaiey 4y ago
Or a real diverse series based on a diverse book series which never spent a dime on reminding everyone how diverse they are. Eg The Expanse.

madaxe_again 4y ago

Man, half a billion dollars on an entertainment product - that money could be poured into something useful, like space. We shouldn’t be spending money on earthly delights until we’ve fixed all the problems in space. What practical applications have hobbits given us, anyway?

baud147258 4y ago
> What practical applications have hobbits given us second breakfast, for one

anshumankmr 4y ago

Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested. And the "internet" really reacted negatively to the trailer as well. (I personally didn't hate the trailer myself but after having watched the original trilogy and the first Hobbit movie, I was feeling a bit underwhelmed cause it didn't do a good job selling the show to me.) So it really remains to be seen whether it will be a hit when it does to go to streaming.

oblio 4y ago
> Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested. Probably all of the above plus it's a long term move. Amazon needs to build up a strong catalog and marquee TV shows are long term attractions. As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s. Game of Thrones would have been the exact thing but D&D completely tore it apart in the last 2 seasons.
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  I don't know. 465 million seems still steep for 8 episodes TV show. I am all for it cause Disney has seemingly skimped on their CG budget for their newer shows. So more competition means more TV shows will have film quality production. But it is a concern, if their show costs more than something like Avengers: Endgame which had some of the biggest actors in Hollywood involved in addition to the probably insane VFX budget. Obviously COVID would have affected the budget for the show, but I have a feeling that it went way over budget than was initially intended. Although I agree with the marquee concept. HBO had their own marquee show: Game of Thrones, though it produced a lot of quality stuff like the Pacific, Band of Brothers, Sopranos etc that can be watched for years to come. Game of Thrones on the other hand was a big disappointment for the fans and its negative reception probably made HBO wonder what they would do after it was over (hence the Targaryen origin show and the Jon Snow series are being developed... personally I'm skipping both)

addicted 4y ago

I’m not so sure the LOTR series is ideal for expansion. It feels like Peter Jackson has already tackled all the really interesting parts of the LOTR world.

oblio 4y ago
Tolkien created a lot of content, an entire fantasy universe. With good storytelling there's a lot more to tell. If Star Wars, which let's be frank here, is a 2 bit creation compared to Tolkien's works, managed to become a multi billion dollar franchise, then the LotR world should be able to do the same, if it's managed wisely.
- notahacker 4y ago
  But then Star Wars was envisaged as a series of films and the sequels and prequels are part of a directly related story with overlapping characters and pacing, with the original creators around to give it their blessing and the occasional bit of creative input. Fans can overlook a lot of shoddiness to see C3PO again or how Darth became Darth. The forging of rings or founding of Rivendell, not so much, and I think the story of how Gollum became Gollum is off limits to the series too. The Amazon LOTR proposal is basically some new fantasy stories set in a different millennium from the LOTR world which loosely tie in with some chronologies Tolkien wrote as lore rather than narrative, with a license which prevents them from reinterpreting events from the LOTR/Hobbit books from a Tolkien Estate that isn't exactly keen on giving the series canonical status. Instead of hobbits from the Shire and kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor under threat - all places that don't exist, never mind the characters - we've got a blank slate fantasy civilisations called Numenor and Eregion (which will resemble LOTR in the same way most high fantasy civilisations tend to) and a pretty loose narrative arc which implies the bad guy eventually destroying them. The output might be very good stories in their own right, or it might be bland as hell, but the hardcore Tolkien fanbase is going to be hard to please. Create a series of episodes purporting to show the full history of the Second Age and it'll be [probably correctly] accused of being disjointed and completely lacking Tolkien's epic storytelling skill; create a compelling quest narrative involving dwarves and hobbits and it'll be accused of discarding Tolkien's actual histories in favour of a cheap knockoff of his plot structure. I mean, a licensee could probably randomly choose a third rate LOTR fanfic plot and sell millions of tickets to watch it, but that doesn't necessary mean its a good idea from a creative standpoint.

oaiey 4y ago

They should have taken 100M of that and fund the remaining three seasons of The Expanse.

Sebb767 4y ago
This would have been great! Allthough, as far as I heard, one of the reasons for stopping was the time jump in the books (full disclosure: I didn't read the books).
- oaiey 4y ago
  There is a time jump. But come on, put some gray hair on and some makeup.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that we've not seen the end of The Expanse's universe.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Yeah, what was with that planet with the alien dog thing?
  - jffry 4y ago
    I don't want to spoil too much, but that was basically the entirety of a novella which is the beginning of a plot line relevant to the final 3 books in the series. I don't know why they would include it if they don't have plans on continuing the show in some form in the future. It's not like there was any shortage of content in the mainline story to cover.
- hedora 4y ago
  I hope you're right, but they had an entire scene in the last episode where the main characters complained at Bezos for cutting off funding. This is not the mark of a show that they plan to renew. :-(

albertopv 4y ago

I hope it'll be better than The Wheel of Time, not that it takes much...

elias94 4y ago

I doubt anything interesting will came out from that expensive series. They're doing it for the money, not for the product. And that as always be a clear indicator of a low quality product.

deleted 4y ago
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marie1595 4y ago

[dead]

chrisseaton 4y ago

> New Zealand, where the show is shooting I think they’ve switched to England and Wales haven’t they? Which is probably closer to the author’s inspirations (Tolkien never set foot in New Zealand.)

KineticLensman 4y ago
> Which is probably closer to the author’s inspirations (Tolkien never set foot in New Zealand.) Yes. A youthful walking holiday in the Alps was also a source of inspiration.

usrname 4y ago

Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good. bezzzos bezzosn my bezzzos

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Just like Melkor creating the orcs...
bergenty 4y ago
Please no YouTube tier comments.
- Reubachi 4y ago
  This is a reference to LOTR creationism/lore.

prepend 4y ago

Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t anything remarkable and seem to have just done other Amazon shows. Of course there are video projects done by unknowns that turn out great (Jackson had done Heavenly Creatures and Frighteners and a few others before LOTR), but I was kind of hoping there’d be some creative team who is really into Tolkien who tells great stories. Also, I don’t recognize the actors at all. Like not a single one. Compared to LOTR, they didn’t rely on stars but they had Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Viggo Mortenson, Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett. It seems strange to not have anyone. I thought this was a cost cutting effort, but that doesn’t make sense if $465M. I worry that this is Amazon saying “cost is no limit” to a project team instead of artists and creators.

cgeier 4y ago
While I'm not particularly looking forward to this series, having rather unknown actors isn't putting me off at all. And why shouldn't they go with directors they are happy with? TV series often have a lot of different directors, often directing just a single episode of a season or even a series.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  TV series are often bad though. You can often see drastic dips in episode quality. Do they really know what they’re doing with these directors?
- Sebb767 4y ago
  The budget-talent-ratio just seems off. Usually, movies spend a lot of money on hiring talent, which here clearly isn't the case here. So the question is where is that money going. Grandparent and I are afraid that we end with something graphically completely overproduced and no story. Also, if you provide a junior engineer with a few million, you can't expect perfect software, even with that budget. Same reservations apply here.

darkerside 4y ago

From reading the article, $200M was for the rights alone, and NZ is rebating 25% so it comes out to more like 150M net on production of the actual show.

framapotari 4y ago
No, the NZ rebate is based on production costs, which doesn't count funds spent on purchasing the rights to a project.
wasmitnetzen 4y ago
Sounds to me like it's rather $665M in total, with a rebate of $116M.

AzzieElbab 4y ago

Cool. And if the series flop it will trigger some major review to modern movie/tv making

layer8 4y ago
It may not happen with this series, because too many will probably still watch it even if it’s terrible, but it’s bound to happen for some franchise at some point, and maybe things will get interesting then.
- AzzieElbab 4y ago
  Last interesting sci-fi show I watched was The Expanse, it was on Prime. One may hope.
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
Maybe, but I’m skeptical. The TV/Streaming space seems flush with cash and several high budget series have flopped or otherwise significantly underperformed without an industry wide reflection or reaction. I suspect it is because these streaming service owners are desperate to build big content libraries rather than produce high quality shows.

theplumber 4y ago

Let's hope they won't turn it into a diversity thing checking all the boxes and loosing the plot

usrn 4y ago
I think that ship already sailed.
alldayeveryday 4y ago
Lol, the "diversity thing" is the star of the show here as evidenced by both the media they (creators) have put out (images, etc) + by their own admission.
tlear 4y ago
Whole thing is The Message and nothing more

panick21_ 4y ago

After Wheel of Time my expectations are so incredibly low, if it still manages to disappoint I will be impressed. I'm expecting a shitshow and a shitstorm of epic proportions.

pluc 4y ago
I'm expecting a 465 million dollar joke about the ease of delivering products to Mordor using Amazon's infrastructure. If not in live action then at least as an advertising campaign based in supporting material.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Stop giving them ideas!
  - pluc 4y ago
    If the "ma" of the Amazon logo isn't modified with a pictogram of LOTR landmarks someone needs to get fired. "From A to Z through The Shire" should be their Superbowl campaign.
- harveywi 4y ago
  Wheel of Prime
jsmeaton 4y ago
Yeah, Wheel of Time was really bad. I tried so hard to like it but it had little to redeem it.
vlunkr 4y ago
Wow I didn't even know that happened until right now. At least they're advertising for Rings of Power.
mrwh 4y ago
Have to agree! I'm not sure what I was expecting with Wheel of Time, but I wasn't expecting it to look so cheap. Also one of the central characters wears a pullover in early episodes that's definitely dry-clean only, and had definitely just been dry-cleaned. While it sounds like a little thing, it's the little things that add up to an immersive world.

d4rkp4ttern 4y ago

Tangential — I wish they or someone else serializes Dune. It’s so tailor made for a tv series. Also looking forward to Three Body Problem from nflx

anshumankmr 4y ago
>I wish they or someone else serializes Dune https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  That (and the follow-on) weren't too bad. Much better than Lynch's treatment. I must say, though, that I'm looking forward to part 2 of Villeneuve's Dune.
  - anshumankmr 4y ago
    Haven't had the time to watch it. Working my way through the book.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      It's pretty much impossible to adequately represent the books as a movie, and even a series can't really do the books justice. The new movie does a fairly decent job of translating the books to live action. The biggest disappointment, for me, in all of the treatments (including the movie), is the way the Fremen are represented. I'm a bit spoiled, as I grew up in Africa, and was familiar with tribes like the Touareg, so I know what real desert-dwellers look like. I'm pretty sure that Herbert wanted them to look like that. Hard to represent, with city-dweller, millionaire actors. Bedouin tribespeople look like dry twigs. Not much soft or fat. It would take serious self-denial to adequately represent. Willem Dafoe would probably be able to represent Stilgar (in my mind). He'd have to go on a diet, and get a tan, though.
  - MikusR 4y ago
    The miniseries and especially Children of Dune are so much better that the recent movie.

aaron695 4y ago

drumhead 4y ago

The last hurrah for web money profligacy maybe. Investors aren't going to be too happy to see so much money spent without a commensurately large return in this economic climate.

djbebs 4y ago

So much money for something that I can already tell will flop... I really don't understand why they put people who have no connection with the IP in charge of this. It's really quite sad to see such a beloved world getting an adaptation that is destroyed by poor writing and design by committee

prox 4y ago
World wide format demographics means we have a cookie cutter adaption that probably just plays the script as a checklist needed to be done instead of anything inspiring. How about a movie on a fictional global shopping conglomerate with a selfish CEO who doesn’t want to pay fair wages.
deleted 4y ago
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layer8 4y ago
The IP is only used for its value as a brand. There’s an argument to be made that such productions are prone to diminishing the value of the brand if they turn out to be subpar. On the other hand, mainstream consumers usually aren’t too demanding. So brands tend to get watered down to minimal viable mediocrity.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I see that argument a lot but my thought is that people just aren't looking at a long enough time frame, I mean everyone was excited for fantastic beasts and it was considered okay, but it made a ton of money because of the brand. But then they made the second one which the general reaction to seems to be "What the HECK?" but it still had decent sells because people liked the brand and most importantly didn't realize they didn't like it until after they had seen it, now fantastic beasts 3 had incredibly low returns because all the brand had been burned at that point. I think a huge problem is that especially, in the tech sector where things move so fast, people don't realize that many things, especially societal matters can move very slowly from a human perspective. I mean everyone how many big name tech companies do you know off the top of your head that are dying now, slowly, but still making money because of inertia? Some things just take a while someone who loves something can eventually have their love of that thing burned if it goes poorly for long enough.

mabbo 4y ago

I suspect this will go down beside the Fire Phone. Amazon just sometimes gets this idea that if they spend enough money they're sure to win. I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions. I really don't get this sentiment. AWS was a loss making unit once much like any other innovative idea. Amazon funds 1000s of different ideas with the intention that few will work. If government would break up companies like this, there would be no interest in pursuing ideas by big companies and no funding for stuff which has any R and D cost.
- mabbo 4y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but it doesn't hold water when you reach the scale of a company like Amazon, for the time periods we're talking about. The entire retail market is being undercut by Amazon Retail. Competition is being reduced to fewer and fewer competitors- which is bad for the consumer in the long run. All the while, Amazon retail can afford to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year, over and over again, because AWS makes up the difference. They can afford to build hundreds of high tech warehouses to reduce their costs further, all from the income from AWS. I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think it's okay that things are operating this way. (And lets not even get into the abuse of customers and merchants on their retail marketplace, which frankly to me are enough that the government should have intervened long ago.)
  - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    It holds specially for company like Amazon. Do you know how many business Amazon is running on loss? AFAIK they are very liberal in spending in R and D or with long term motive. AWS was once such a project. Who would have though that companies are ready to spend 5x if you add extra services alongside the server. Also, AFAIK Amazon shopping site is not in loss in US. Your suggestion could have made sense if Amazon is using AWS money to strengthen the monopoly, but Amazon shopping is a profitable business, in part due to advertisement.

glanzwulf 4y ago

Considering there's not a single relevant main stream actor, director or writer on the team. I don't understand where they're spending the money on. Can't wait to see it, but my expectations cannot go lower

chrisseaton 4y ago
There’s talent out there beyond celebrities and movie stars.
- prepend 4y ago
  There’s great talent, but they don’t command large fees. So GP’s question stands. They aren’t spending money on actors and writers, so where is the money going? That’s a lot of spirit gum.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  But that talent comes cheaper, where is this $400MM going?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Hopefully: big sets, lots of extras, on-location shooting. Probably also some internal accounting bullshit like "the Amazon home page is worth $100M as an ad placement spot".
ceejayoz 4y ago
> Considering there's not a single relevant main stream actor, director or writer on the team. I don't understand where they're spending the money on. Honestly, I'd rather money spent on props, effects, etc. than brand-name actors. Look at Stranger Things; virtually no one famous in it.
- glanzwulf 4y ago
  Yeah, and look at Stranger Things, it started with a 6M per episode budget and now (due to massive success and fame the actors got their share) is at 30M per episode. That means season 1 was 48M and now season 4 is at 240M.

emptyfile 4y ago

Considering how awful the Hobbit movies were I can't see how this could be worse. In any case, after the horror that was Wheel of Time, I'm not watching any Amazon fantasy shows unless they get glowing reviews (from real critics, not tech news commentators).

j_barbossa 4y ago

Media productions are daughters of their time. We currently have a situation where the elite in Hollywood are desperate to bring diversity and blackwashing into the stories. When a new LOTR series is shot in 50 years from now, this will no longer be an issue.

dougmwne 4y ago
As a fantasy series, it seems the ethnicities of the actors are quite irrelevant. I can understand that it can be a bit odd in historical dramas, but male actors used to play the female roles in plays. It seems pretty secondary unless the plot is explicitly about race. And historical accuracy, even in historical dramas is usually tenuous at best anyway. I’d suggest that when you say “blackwashing” people are going to take that as a signal that you have some pretty toxic politics.
- prepend 4y ago
  I think it’s an opportunity to explain how elves and dwarves ended up with different skin colors and whatnot. It’s a good opportunity for world building. In the Hobbit movies there were some black elves and they didn’t describe anything about them. Just that there were some Black Forest elves mixed in with all the other elves. I guess it slightly distracted where every minor detail had some back story and history, but I don’t think detracted from the story. I don’t think leaving out these details was in the top 100 flaws of the Hobbit movie. As someone really into Tolkien, I’d rather see them expand or adapt the lore than just swap out details. It’s not that it’s the end of the world, but it’s dangerous to change details from someone else’s work because I never know what was the actual important piece. I suppose I could change Michaelangelo’s David’s sex but it would be hard to recreate it with the same qualia as Muchaelangelo as I’m not him. It’s not the sex of the sculpture that’s important, it’s my implementation. I’m sure Michaelangelo would have e carved an amazing woman, or African, or Asian, or any background. But few are Michaelangelo. An example of this that I think went kind of well is the Kevin Kostner Robin Hood movie where they cast Morgan Freeman and gave him a back story of being a Moor from the crusades who returned to England. I think this worked out better than if they had just randomly changed a Robin Hood character ‘a race.

wasmitnetzen 4y ago

That percentage based rebate incentivizes accounting shenanigans to make it look as expensive as possible, who knows how many salaries included in that number Amazon was paying anyway, no matter if they would have produced that show or not.

j5r5myk 4y ago

The Severance budget was over $300 million and that shot in NYC so $350 in NZ after rebate makes sense. I had heard they were spending $1 billion on the new LOTR, maybe that’s including rights and marketing

StevePerkins 4y ago
I'm going to need a citation on that. Sources that I read from a quick web search indicate that Apple is spending an average of $10 million per episode on its shows. How "Severance" could cost $300 million, when it takes place almost entirely on an indoor office set, defies plausibility.
- j5r5myk 4y ago
  You are right I checked my sources and I was quite mistaken. $100 million budget is it what it landed at.

langsoul-com 4y ago

Even though the MMO got cancelled, I hope they'll make Battle for Middle Earth 3. Honestly, BFME 2 was the shit. Doubt it though, rts hasn't been the rage for a looooong time.

999900000999 4y ago

>Amazon cancels Lord of the Rings MMO video game This stood out to me, let's just say the MMO came out as well. Then the entire thing looks like a long-term investment to reinvigorate the franchise. I actually really liked the WB Game's RPGs

detritus 4y ago

Not to be That Guy, but crikey - think of all the good that could be done in the world for half a billion dollars. . Cue my usual thought about how the likes of Apple could make/break Fusion Energy (prove/disprove viability) for a small percentage of their bank balance.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
well at least i don't need to feel so guilty about all those amazon returns.

gonzo41 4y ago

Could we just get a few more seasons of the Expanse. Or Dune. C'mon people we've done this one already.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

It will flop.

the_only_law 4y ago

Good God can someone come up with a unique or at least mildly novel idea? I'm getting sick of seeing remakes and spinoffs of classic franchises or series that absolutely disrespect the originals by pumping out some garbage ass show that will somehow last longer than a season.

rcpt 4y ago
Chernobyl 2
- atom058 4y ago
  Chernobyl: Fukushima
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >Chernobyl 2: Nuclear Boogaloo FTFY

tlear 4y ago

This will make last 2 seasons of GoT seem like War and Peace. That trailer.. Read books probably 5-6 times, read Silmarillion(!), watched the movies probably 10 times, even watched Hobbit twice(that was painful). Only tattoos I have are in Cirth.. I could have easily dumped thousands of bucks on merchandise and other crap together with my kids over the years if it looked even remotely decent. I am not subscribing to prime or watching this garbage.

niek_pas 4y ago
Claiming that this is garbage based on a single trailer seems a little premature.
- robonerd 4y ago
  That seems like an odd take. The purpose of a trailer is for the production to make their best argument to the audience about why they should see this show. If a trailer looks good, people get hyped for the show or movie and buy tickets when the time comes. If the trailers looks like crap, most people won't watch the show or movie. The whole purpose of a trailer is for people to judge whether or not to invest more of their time and money in that production. There simply isn't enough time for people to watch everything, there is way too much media for that. And this LOTR show is going to be much longer than a typical movie, because it's a TV show. I expect 8 hours at minimum, assuming each of the 8 episodes is an hour. Expecting people to watch it before judging whether it's worth their time doesn't make any sense. Which is why trailers are made...

mensetmanusman 4y ago

It’s going to be interesting how badly this will fail _if_ they are focused on making an international success that also can be viewed in China…

ninju 4y ago

Old article...needs [2021] in title

breatheoften 4y ago

$465 million for one season of TV seems very expensive. But $465 million as part of the bootstrapping/rnd budget for some new gpu-adjacent compute offering would be pretty easy to justify ... and potentially being able to move some of the development cost associated with that new cloud offering out of aws and into some other budgetary boundary is almost certain to provide stock boosting effects. It seems obvious to me that the tech companies with streaming platforms have started using tv/movie production budgets as a way to fund research into offerings appropriate for development teams that are highly-creative/technically competent/and driven by result oriented pressure. Adding value to the production stacks used by those kinds of teams is hard but also technically worthwhile and pretty measurable. And having discerning and hard to please customers as early partners/beta testers for a new service could be very valuable. I suspect Apple is doing this kind of thing as well with their shows where you can see the same or similar high-end visual effects appearing on multiple of their shows -- feels like the kind of thing you'd expect to happen with different creative teams using converging 'in-house' tooling ...

acomjean 4y ago
250 Million was just licensing. So they're starting in a deep hole. Strange, Amazon seem to went the budget route for "Wheel of Time" which I enjoyed, (though popular I hadn't read any of the books). The effects were good, acting was good. But think of the product placement offerings Middle Earth offers amazon. The amazon prime delivery wagon. Alexa smart speakers were bountiful in that time as were "fire" tablets, forged from dragons breath.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  The acting in wheel of time was not good. It was bad enough to ruin the whole thing for me. Acting in high fantasy can be really tough because the rolls are commonly so different from what the actors are used to, but they did not get it done.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  An observation from an online review of WoT that I agreed with is that the writers were far more comfortable writing scenes that were not in the original material than they were adapting existing scenes from the book. This does leave one to wonder why they bothered to license the books though. It's well agreed upon that it is a difficult property to adapt to screen, and the first season is (IMO) further evidence of that. P.S. The acting was merely "okay" for me; Pike (Moiraine) absolutely nailed her part, others were more hit-or-miss (my wife who had not read the books also liked Rutherford as Perrin). I don't know if Harris did a good job, or if it's just that Mat has the most personality of any actor, but I liked him as well; either way Harris is not going to be in Season 2, so it's moot going forward.

SilverBirch 4y ago

Given the change in market dynamics around video streaming, I think there are going to be a decent number of projects like this, that no matter how good they are, stand no chance of being positive ROI anymore (if they ever were). I think a really interesting angle on this is what does Amazon do in the few years after the series comes out. They've sunk so much money into the rights for this, and it is a valuable property, but it's going to be impossible to spend similar budgets on anything new. I wonder if we're going to see a massively expensive season 1 and then simply nothing because they don't want to do a season 2 with 1/5th of the budget.

namelessoracle 4y ago

Star Wars Episode 3 was made off of 115 million to put things in perspective. Even adjusted for inflation.....

sidlls 4y ago

Hopefully it doesn't turn into the dreck that the Wheel of Time series has turned out to be. And no, I'm not referring to the garbage "anti-woke" drivel that racists have peddled about the show. I'm simply referring to the fact that the series is so far removed from the actual story that claiming the series is "based on" the books is even a stretch. It's basically a completely different story that uses the same character names and some terminology.

rr888 4y ago

> $465 million ... New Zealand ... would be rebating the production around 25% of its costs, or $116 million. So it probably cost $100 mil but Bezos found a way to get NZ taxpayers to pay for it.

phasersout 4y ago
That's probably closer to the truth than most other ideas... does this new Arri camera really cost 4 million a pop? hm... well could be... I'm just a Wellington tax officer...
notatoad 4y ago
if it was all just a scam to get NZ to pay for it, presumably they would have kept that going instead of moving production to the UK for subsequent seasons, where they get drastically less tax credits.

ReptileMan 4y ago

It can't be worse than wheel of time ... or can it?

ethagknight 4y ago

There must be some level of tax strategy across these streaming platforms to get a video series to pay for a buildout of IT infrastructure that then gets added to its general AWS service (or iCloud etc). Many US states have wildly generous film tax credits, so it’s almost conning these states into footing the bill for the next AWS data center. (Edit: NZ is paying 25% into this project as an economic and tourism generator) As others have pointed out, this is a lot of money for a series without recognizable names, so potentially the true cost of production is a very overpriced contract for digital services. The article cites “expensive costumes and elaborate sets” as a cost driver, I guess we will have to wait and see, but that seems like a cover. To quote Arrested Development, “It’s one banana, Michael! What could it cost, $10?” Nonetheless, exciting to see an updated and hopefully more approachable journey into Middle Earth. I love LOTR, but cannot get my family excited to hunker down for a 3+ hour movie compared to watching 1hr chunks of tv series.

jmyeet 4y ago

This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning: 1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical; 2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode. Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits. 3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley); 4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't. 5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good. 6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic. If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late). Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project. [1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-1-billion-1202127879/ https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-ri...

snickerbockers 4y ago

This is going to be terrible. I can't imagine the SHEER FUCKING HUBRIS modern TV writers must have of they think they can write a fanfic that stands next to Tolkien's greatest work. These writers' only experience is working on a 4th film in JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot universe which ended up getting cancelled too.

AlwaysRock 4y ago
Quality doesnt matter anymore. It will get views because it has a brand attached to it and lots of people already have prime. I don't know what their break even number is but prime is fucking expensive. If this pushes 1% of people who are on the edge of buying prime and not buying prime into making that decision its a massive win for them. I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made.
- ausbah 4y ago
  >I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made. what is the most objective judge of quality if not what people are willing to watch
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    I don't know. I don't think popular can be equated with good though. Love is Blind was hugely popular. It is terrible tv. The same can be said about most content. If you come up with an objective system that everyone agrees on you will be a billionaire. But anyone can tell you that popular doesnt equal good.
- dopeboy 4y ago
  As a desperate Star Wars fan, I concur. It is a canon and world I am so bought into that I will consume substandard content. I imagine the same applies to LOTR fans.
  - azekai 4y ago

impalallama 4y ago

The Wheel of Time series was of such middling quality that I'm more skeptical of this than ever. Not that a Silmarillion tv show really has much appeal to me anyway.

0xcb0 4y ago

I'm sure people find this offensive and offtopic, but As much as I'm a LOTR fan, I really can't wrap my head around why we spend so much money on creating a fiction series while millions of people are at risk of death from hunger, thirst, and climate change. With 465$M, so many people could be saved. :(

mooreds 4y ago

Totally OT, but this kind of stuff drives me up the wall: "Now, Deadline confirms that the first season of the show will cost $465 million to produce. For comparison’s sake, Peter Jackson’s whole Lord of the Rings trilogy cost $281 million to make. For something more recent, Game of Thrones was spending around $100 million per season after it really blew up — this would be around season 6 — and spent far less in its early days." The issue is that there is no inflation adjustment. $281M was different in the 2000s than it is now. In fact, per https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $281M in Jan 2004 (the last LoTR movie was released in Dec 2003) is $443M in May 2022 dollars. Still eye popping numbers, but the costs for the series and the moves are no longer hundreds of millions of dollars apart.

softwaredoug 4y ago

I think people are burned out by prestige TV The market is flooded and there’s only so many complicated series people can keep track of at one time. It’s like trying to read a dozen book series at the same time. Years ago with shows like game of thrones, the market was more sustainable. A single show could justify a high budget and dominate cultural discussions for a while. Now the market is so streaming forward and swamped by streaming services people can’t keep up. It’s just becoming work to keep up with these shows. Not to mention the whole thing could end poorly (ie Game of Thrones) You see this in the prevalence of limited series like Queens Gambit / Obi wan. People are just happy to have a self contained story where they don’t have to work. Or they want throw away, mindless TV that they doesn’t require much deep thinking.

acchow 4y ago
> I think people are burned out by prestige TV Can you give some examples? I'm re-watching Westworld from the beginning now because I find most of what's out there to be boring
- wmeredith 4y ago
  Not OP, but there's an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to scripted dramas and comedies. Apple TV+ - Severance - Ted Lasso - For All Mankind - Slow Horses HBOMax - We Own This City - Hacks - Barry - Tokyo Vice - Gentleman Jack - Peacemaker - White Lotus - Curb Your Enthusiasm - Minx - Insecure - Industry There are many more, but just on those two streamers that's a dozen+ shows that I've been really impressed by in one way or the other over the last year. And my list to watch has just as much on it. As for a direct recommendation, I highly suggest you check out Severance if you like Westworld. It's slower burn, but similarly twisty sci-fi thriller.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Westworld was good for exactly one season. I stopped watching halfway through the first episode of the second because they decided they needed to take a regular woman character and turn her into a “boss”.

jollybean 4y ago

It's basically guaranteed, that even if it's bad, it will be a huge hit. The material/fanbase is just to energetic. They and kids, at minimum, will watch it.

GenerocUsername 4y ago

It's going to flop due to perceived wokeness and pandering with changes to source material intent and vision

georgeecollins 4y ago

Production costs have gone up a lot in New Zealand after Peter Jackson put them on the map. Also, if the government is covering 25% of the costs it creates an intended incentive to spend more. People spend a lot on content because successful content is worth it. I hope this is good.

felizuno 4y ago

$465m was a pretty standard price tag for a single Ferrari/Red Bull/Merc F1 season pre-covid, and I think the merch opportunities and addressable market are probably pretty comparable

srveale 4y ago

Does anyone else find it ironic and kind of sad that Amazon, of all companies, has taken over a story about the evils of greed and lust for power, and which idolizes the simple, pastoral lifestyle above all else? There are few places less Shire-like than an Amazon warehouse.

Corrado 4y ago

I would love for this to be good, but I'm afraid it's going to follow in the footsteps of "The Shannara Chronicles". I read every single one of the "Shannara" books as well as the sub-series (Word & Void, etc.) but I watched 2 episodes of Chronicles and couldn't stand it. I don't know if it's because I had a whole look and feel for the characters in my mind's eye and the show didn't reflect that. Or maybe it was because they told a story that was similar to the books but not quite the same. Or maybe it was bad CGI and writing. Whatever it was, the show just didn't sit right with me. This LOTR series feels very similar.

mkaic 4y ago

I feel like I'm one of the only people here who's actually... quite optimistic and excited about this? Like -- I really don't see Amazon screwing this up. Bezos is a fan of the franchise and is smart enough to know that this can't be screwed up without consequences. I also think that the lack of established talent being hired is actually a good thing, because it means they looked beyond the famous names we've all heard and presumably found a whole collection of diamonds in the rough. If Bezos is willing to spend half a billion on a bunch of unknowns, I'm going to bet that those unknowns are pretty darn promising. Anyways, thought I'd counter all the pessimism here with a bit of positivity. I'm stoked for this series, and if it turns out bad after all? Oh well, they tried. It wouldn't be the end of the world.

antonymy 4y ago

This budget feels very out of whack with what we have seen of the production. No big names either in front of or behind the camera. All the recognizable credits are at the producer level, and some of those are of dubious reputation. I don't want to disparage unknown actors and crew members, but it seems awfully risky to expect them to carry this show without any veterans to rally around. I guess the logic Amazon is using is that LotR's brand is so strong it doesn't need star power, or experience, or anything else to carry it besides apparently a huge pile of money. But this seems like a really, really bold direction for a project when Amazon is still very new to producing media and they have yet to produce a single unqualified hit.

Justsignedup 4y ago

Biggest worry: I have massive doubts that this show would bring in profits similar to Avengers: End Game. Because that's what it'll take. Even if this is a smashing success by streaming standards, Season 2 will be ridiculously toned down to keep the costs down to like 50MM. People will instantly say "quality dropped significantly" and then it'll collapse. Feels like this will go the way of Marco Polo which was an amazing show, destroyed by Netflix's lack of desire to spend any money.

TedShiller 4y ago

Spending? Wasting

Cypher 4y ago

ouch, that's gonna hurt