Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#251

Post by mikkergp » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

JCharante wrote: post #119

prepend wrote: post #18

Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t any…

Why do known actors matter? When I see Chris Pratt in a movie I just think oh it's Andy from parks and rec. I see Forrest Gump but in a different movie or Jim Halbert in a horror movie. Known actors make it hard to be immersed.

I think it’s not necessarily bad in it’s own, but no known actors + no known show runner + studio without a track record of success + IP without involvement of its creator and Vague primary sources(ie no specific written narrative to follow) seems like a risky combination.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#252

Post by moonchrome » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #235

moonchrome wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’ll be watched for decades. By a few people - likely. But enough to justify investing half a billion into show production ?

> The hit Warner Bros. sitcom from the 90s, Friends, is still a big moneymaker for the studio with average earnings that are estimated to be roughly a billion dollars per year. Keep in mind that this is a show that ended nearly 15 years ago. Beyond all imagination, this is still one of the most-watched sitcoms in 2017. I know, hard to believe. https://reelrundown.com/tv/How-Much-Money-Does-US-Sitcom-Fri...

I specifically mentioned Friends and Seinfeld as exceptions. Mad Men is never going to have this status. Friends viewership numbers were 10x, even Sopranos had 2-3x viewership. And there will be no nostalgia factor there.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#253

Post by mabbo » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #247

mabbo wrote: post #62

I suspect this will go down beside the Fire Phone. Amazon just sometimes gets this idea that if they spend enough money they're sure to win. I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions.

> I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions. I really don't get this sentiment. AWS was a loss making unit once much like any other innovative idea. Amazon funds 1000s of different ideas with the intention that few will work. If government would break up companies like this, there would be no interest in pursuing…

I get where you're coming from, but it doesn't hold water when you reach the scale of a company like Amazon, for the time periods we're talking about.

The entire retail market is being undercut by Amazon Retail. Competition is being reduced to fewer and fewer competitors- which is bad for the consumer in the long run. All the while, Amazon retail can afford to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year, over and over again, because AWS makes up the difference. They can afford to build hundreds of high tech warehouses to reduce their costs further, all from the income from AWS.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think it's okay that things are operating this way.

(And lets not even get into the abuse of customers and merchants on their retail marketplace, which frankly to me are enough that the government should have intervened long ago.)

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#254

Post by mikkergp » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #147

prepend wrote: post #18

Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t any…

> And not to involve Jackson seems off Personally, the more I reflect on the Jackson series, the less I'm a fan. He borrowed heavily from the pacing, framing, and selectiveness of Bakshi's animated film, which didn't finish the trilogy. But worse, though inevitable when you have billions of $$ in your eyeballs, Jackson over-printed a lot of kids' imaginations with his depictions. I can't remember what I thought thing…

I still love the original animated hobbit. The pacing was a mess, but there was something about the creativity in the animated films of the 70’s that we’ve lost I think. Wouldn’t translate to a modern audience, but I love that, i dunno I’ve been calling it “leather bound fantasy” feeling.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#255

Post by treis » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

zpeti wrote: post #244

treis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Since they didn't, well, having a black Legolas just destroys continuity Again it's just skin color. Little bit dramatic to call that destroying continuity.

Quoted post unavailable.

>How about the repeated obsession with female characters who can easily beat up men?

The thing you complain about is in the source material. Remember? "No man can kill me", "I am no man", stab stab stab.

>But watching these women beat up men is laughable tbh. Maybe ask some famle survivors of domestic violence how they feel about this.

How is that any different than tiny weak Hobbits killing giant spiders and otherwise being the heroes of the story?

Weak actually being strong is a repeating theme across the fanatasy/superhero/comic genre. And since they're primarily written by physically weak nerds the motivation is obvious. Now that women are being included in the process they're doing the same thing for the same reasons.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#256

Post by nonameiguess » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

oaiey wrote: post #22

They should have taken 100M of that and fund the remaining three seasons of The Expanse.

As has been hinted at here, the fact that they included Strange Dogs into season 6 is a pretty clear hint that more is coming. There is no reason to include that if they aren't going to adapt the Laconia storyline at some point, since the only purpose of that story is to introduce us to this new planet and what the Mars rebels discovered there.

I suspect they're going for a film trilogy with a much bigger budget per minute filmed than the TV series. For one thing, some of the action gets a lot bigger in scale. Two, the time jump means all the main characters are now in their 70s and 80s. Avasarala is over 100. Either they go the Twin Peaks route and actually wait 30 years and hope everyone is still alive and working, or they go the Disney route and spend ungodly money on digitally aging everyone. Or they could just recast, but I think doing that as season 7 of the same show would have been pretty jarring.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#257

Post by Pakdef » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

oaiey wrote: post #22

They should have taken 100M of that and fund the remaining three seasons of The Expanse.

No post body was provided.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#258

Post by zpeti » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #255

zpeti wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>How about the repeated obsession with female characters who can easily beat up men? The thing you complain about is in the source material. Remember? "No man can kill me", "I am no man", stab stab stab. >But watching these women beat up men is laughable tbh. Maybe ask some famle survivors of domestic violence how they feel about this. How is that any different than tiny weak Hobbits killing giant spiders and otherwi…

Storytelling, that's how. Which doesn't exist.

What you'll notice is that in better storytelling, there will be an explanation of why the hobbit can beat the giant spider. Outsmarting it, being invisible with a ring, whatever. Good storytelling means you make the impossible seem possible.

Now, all we have is token women who we all know are there because they are women, beating up men in ridiculously impossible ways, with no explanation of how. It's just that the writers want you to know that women are strong grrrrr. Because feminism. Well, it makes for terrible cinema.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#259

Post by frumper » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #199

hbosch wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, I don’t recognize the actors at all. Like not a single one. Compared to LOTR, they didn’t rely on stars but they had Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Viggo Mortenson, Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett. It seems strange to not have anyone. I thought this was a cost cutting effort, but that doesn’t make sense if $465M. Well, lets start off by admitting to ourselves that guys like Elijah…

Well... Sean Astin was Rudy.

Goonies never say die.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#260

Post by breatheoften » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

$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 ...