At $465 million for the first season alone, Amazon is spending an absolute mint to bring the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” to television.
As part of a recent THR roundtable with entertainment executives, Amazon’s Jennifer Salke was asked about what that price tag says not just about the show but the streaming industry as a whole today.
Salke cited the recent Netflix deal of $469 million for two “Knives Out” sequels as showcasing how ‘crazy’ the market is right now and then explains:
“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.”
Indeed, a good portion of that figure was spent in securing the rights deals. Even so, the actual production spend will easily eclipse anything seen in a series before.
The series will focus on the Second Age of Middle-earth, the time before the events of the film trilogy and is expected to deal with Sauron’s rise to power.
Production on the first season is underway in New Zealand with a second season already ordered. Recently Swedish-French filmmaker Charlotte Brändström (“The Witcher,” “Outlander”) boarded the show as a director – joining J.A. Bayona and Wayne Che Yip at the helm of episodes.
