4 ms·

$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 wou

$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.

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.