New Line
Lord of the Rings
Last year, Amazon made it abundantly clear that it was tired of playing second (well, fourth) fiddle to the prestige programs of rivals like HBO, Netflix and Hulu, and it was hunting for its own Game of Thrones-level hit. Nothing on their upcoming docket seemed like it fit that bill, until they shelled out $250 million for the rights to Lord of the Rings, and set a TV series in motion.

A new THR article describes the inner workings of the sale, where one of the chief lawyers involved called it “the most complicated deal I’ve ever seen.” The idea is that the hugely popular fantasy series is the thing that has the best chance of going toe-to-toe with a ratings monster and critical darling like Game of Thrones, and a total of almost $6 billion at the box office across six films seems fairly promising as well.
But Amazon is going to pay dearly to bring this dream to life. THR reports that the deal includes a five-season commitment to a Lord of the Ringsshow, which, when all is said and done, could end up costing Amazon more than $1 billion.

This strikes me as mildly insane.
While I understand Amazon’s desire to find their own Game of Thrones type hit, paying this much for the rights to Lord of the Rings and developing a massive show in that world does not seem like the right way to go about this, particularly at that eye-popping price. Granted, if anyone can afford it, it’s Amazon, but this seems like they’re assuming they can just spend their way to a high quality program, and I’m not sure that’s the case.
New Line
The Hobbit

One problem? Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy is almost too good. Lord of the Rings fans hold that up as the golden standard, and anything of lesser quality than that is going to get run out of town. That’s an incredibly high bar to set, in addition to the other bar that is the show needing to be on the level of rival Game of Thrones, as well.
The other problem? Peter Jackson’s follow-up trilogy is pretty bad. This demonstrates what happens when you run out of source material and have to stretch what little you have to work with into something larger than it should be. The Hobbit trilogy pales in comparison to the original LOTR trilogy, and if Peter Jackson himself couldn’t make the concept work, I’m wondering what chance Amazon has without him, and almost no source material to work with at all, given that everything else has already been adapted to death. They can have a world with Hobbits and Elves and Orcs and power rings, but they have no roadmap, they’ll have to make it all up unless they re-adapt the original books, which seems like an even worse idea. Even Game of Thrones had George RR Martin’s books to follow, and Amazon seems like it’s on its own arduous path to Mordor, with peril lurking around every turn.
I’m not saying I don’t want to see them try. I personally couldn’t care less if Amazon wants to spend a billion dollars on 50+ episodes of a Lord of the Rings TV show. I certainly want to see what they come up with, it just seems to me that this was not the wisest road to take. They would have probably been better off buying the rights to any number of other, lesser known but still great fantasy series for adaption. I know the rights to some of these are already sold, but I would have loved to see a First Law series, a Kingkiller series, a Stormlight Archives series, and so on. Lord of the Rings feels like a well that ran dry about twenty minutes into the second Hobbit movie, and I’m not sure what more Amazon can extract from it at this point.
It’s not yet clear when we’ll see this show on Amazon Prime, but the terms of the deal say that production must start within the next two years. Inevitably by the time it arrives, Game of Thrones will be over and HBO will be producing spin-offs, and Amazon would hope that’s the right time to strike.

Fly, you fools.
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