What “The House of the Dragon” to “Game of Thrones”, “The Rings of Power” is presented as the ambitious prequel series based on JRR Tolkien’s books and trilogy”The Lord of the rings“. A project that It has cost Amazon Prime $715 million. for an 8-episode season, the equivalent of revenue from more than 5 million annual subscriptions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Amazon Prime, which has more than 200 million customers with an average income of US $ 139 per year, competed hard to keep the rights to the epic story: it disbursed almost US $ 250 million and spent another US$ 500 million in the production of the program in New Zealand, and tens of millions of dollars in marketing and promotion.
But despite the massive cost of the program, only would represent about 0.15% of Amazon revenue in 2021. The retail giant can afford the expense several times over, and it’s also betting the show will grow big enough to spawn spin-offs and merchandising, as “Game of Thrones” did for HBO.
For the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezosa Tolkien fanatic, producing the show is about more than money: “I hope Let’s do justice to Tolkien’s work“, he prayed in an interview with Time.
The Amazon show takes place over a period of the Middle Earththe Second Age, when the human kingdom of Numenor was at its height, the Elves divided their time between distant Valinor and their repose in Rivendell, and sauron just started planning making the rings.
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The co-creator of the series, JD Payne, acknowledged in Empire that the budget of the series is monstrous: US $ 500 million, nearly double the $281 million Peter Jackson movie trilogy cost. “This season is an eight-hour movie. It’s the length of three Marvel movies on the budget of one. In that context, what is being produced could be said to be a bargain,” Payne explained.
“Stranger Things,” Netflix’s most successful series in terms of subscriber conversion, had a reported budget of $30 million per episode for its fourth season. the epic series “The Witcher” starring Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, a superpowered monster hunter who exterminates fearsome mythological creatures (based on the book series by Andrzej Sapkowski and the popular video game franchise of the same name), it cost Netflix about 80 million dollars in the first season, US$10 million per episode.
And the second season of “Shadow and Bone”another of Netflix’s epics, had a budget close to US$5 million per episode. And Disney + is investing even more in the magical “Willow” (sequel to the 1988 film), which will be released on November 22 on the platform.
Therefore, the disbursement “The Rings of Power” It is not unreasonable for Amazon, which has global revenues of 31.77 billion dollars, and concentrates more than 75% of Prime members in the US: about 160 million users, against the remaining 40 million of international users. The series is conceived as a hook for the global jump of the platform: the books of “The Lord of the Rings” have been translated into about 40 languages and has sold more than 150 million copies.
Amazon, which has a high member retention rate (93%), needs 12.5 million new subscribers in a year to cover the cost of production, and plans to grow by more than 20 with the new franchise.
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