Amazon executive Jennifer Salke recently explained why they paid so much for The Lord of the Rings series.
Television shows continue to grow budget-wise, with Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios putting out shows with budgets north of $100 million on Disney Plus. Recently, we learned Amazon would take big-budget television to the next level, with The Lord of the Rings series costing $465 million for its first season. That price tag is more than the Avengers films.
The Amazon streamer has seen much success in the superhero genre with The Boys and Invincible and The Lord of the Rings will be their biggest release yet. Amazon executive Jennifer Salke recently explained during a roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter why they are paying so much for the upcoming series:
“The market is crazy, as you saw with the Knives Out deal. This is a full season of a huge world-building show. The number is a sexy headline or a crazy headline that’s fun to click on, but that is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series. But it is a crazy world and various people on this Zoom, mostly Bela and me, have been in bidding situations where it starts to go incredibly high. There’s a lot of wooing and we have to make decisions on where we want to stretch and where we want to draw the line. As for how many people need to watch Lord of the Rings? A lot. (Laughs.) A giant, global audience needs to show up to it as appointment television, and we are pretty confident that that will happen.”
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Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings series is being developed by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, who will lead a writer’s room that includes Game of Thrones alum Bryan Cogman. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom director J. A. Bayona is set to direct multiple episodes of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series.
Full details on Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings series are currently unknown, though it is reported to be before the events of The Fellowship of the Ring during the Second Age of Middle-Earth. The Lord of the Rings series is produced by Amazon Studios in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema. The series stars Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Nazanin Boniadi, Tom Budge, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Ema Horvath, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, Tyroe Muhafidin, Sophia Nomvete, Megan Richards, Dylan Smith, Charlie Vickers, and Daniel Weyman.
Amazon has not announced a released date for The Lord of the Rings series. Stay tuned for all the latest news on the upcoming series, and be sure to subscribe to Heroic Hollywood’s YouTube channel for more original video content.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter