Bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ onto the small screen as a TV show surely cost a lot. Amazon knows this pretty well, and after having spent $250 million to acquire rights to this popular property, there is news that they might have to spend another $500 million to produce this show. This is a pretty staggering figure as the original trilogy had cost $281 million. Okay, one can argue that it was way back in the 2000s, but $500 million excluding its marketing costs is pretty high for the production of a TV show.
Almost everyone has watched and loved The Lord of the Rings, and the TV show seems to have been strategically planned as Game of Thrones is soon coming to an end, and the viewers will surely want to feast on another fantasy show. So if Amazon does capture the whole audience, it remains unknown how they will make their money on it.
For all we know, this may just be a little game to acquire a few customers and even build the hype for the Prime service. Well, they did make a very similar gamble on ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and that paid off.
