Amazon’s LOTR Prequel to Cost More Than 500 Million Dollars

Amazon Prime Video has quite a few brilliant original series, but it is still far behind Netflix, in terms of original content. Amazon is upping the ante. A while ago, reports said that the company bought story rights of The Lord of the Rings for a whopping 250 million dollars, a sum that is bigger than most movies’ budget. Now a Reuters report suggests that the total amount including production and marketing costs could amount to 500 million dollars. That is huge, really huge.

Unless Amazon is absolutely sure that it would be an unprecedented success and would be able to lure in a number of consumers, it seems insane to spend that much money. The Lord of the Rings is a well-known franchise and is based on one of the most-sold books of all time. But still, adaptations fail all the time and this seems like a huge gamble. Warner Bros and its sister studio New Line have already made Peter Jackson-directed The Lord of the Rings and its prequel Hobbit movies and earned a lot of dough, even though the latter trilogy was not as much liked by critics as the former. But they both made a lot of bucks. So yes, the appeal is there.

And the writers and directors of this production will not suffer for the lack of material, as JRR Tolkien, the writer of the books, wrote copiously about the history of Middle-Earth, the world where the franchise is set. For instance, Sauron was only the second Dark Lord of the Middle-Earth. Before him, Morgoth, the Devil equivalent and Sauron’s master, had spread darkness upon the world. The content is incredibly rich and just waiting to be mined. Peter Jackson’s movies, one could say, barely scratched the surface.

But the question remains: Will Amazon be able to recover those sky-high costs and earn new subscribers? Only time will tell.

Courtesy : indianexpress