Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

Surely someone is having a real hard look at Rings of Power's turdworthy performance vs budget outlay right?

There were a couple of shows on Amazon I enjoyed:

The English (starring Emily Blunt)
That Dirty Black Bag

And thanks to this thread, I'll be checking out Terminal List.
 
EviLore said:
That one looks interesting, will check it out.

GAF doing more for discovery of Prime shows than Amazon is, tbh.
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Absolutely. I'd never heard of The English and this is right up my alley since I like westerns and I'd watch anything starring Emily Blunt.
 
All the stuff I watch on Prime, solid production, stories and worth watching.

Jack Ryan
The Old Man
The Grand Tour
Clarkson's Farm
James May's Travels
 
For the budget of Rings of Power they could have bought the entire island of New Zealand, built all the sets, then ran it as a survival reality show for DECADES!
 
Netflix cancelled Marco Polo, one of the few shows that I liked. So they can fuck off forever as far as I am concerned. Last good series I watched was Chernobyl.

Actually. no. The last good series was actually Season 2 of Hammond's Workshop.
 
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A lot of Amazon's shows are either great but aimed at a super niche audience or awful and aimed at a mass audience.

Their best shows this year were a show about a 13-foot tall black kid in Oakland and his struggles against a racist superhero (I'm a Virgo) and a pseudo-remake of a psychological horror movie about codependent twin gynecologists (Dead Ringers). Great shows but neither has any real mainstream potential.

Their absolute worst show was Rings of Power, a billion dollar disaster based on one of the most popular franchises of all time that manages to just be unwatchably boring and groan-inducingly corny, and which few people watched to the end.
 
hlm666 said:
no no no don't start tightening the purse strings just yet amazon, I need you to give the warhammer productions lord of the rings levels of cash and then keep your grubby nose out of anything else to do with them................
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I don't want that show to happen with Warhammer 40,000. I like Henry Cavill and I trust him but you know the higher ups are going to demand certain things especially for that ESG score or whatever they call it. You know it's going to be garbage because he's not going to have full control even if he is a producer.
 
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Hudo said:
Netflix cancelled Marco Polo, one of the few shows that I liked. So they can fuck off forever as far as I am concerned. Last good series I watched was Chernobyl.

Actually. no. The last good series was actually Season 2 of Hammond's Workshop.
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I really liked the Marco Polo series. It was strange at first half of Berlin was covered with advertising for the series, only to cancel it a short time later.
 
Spyxos said:
I really liked the Marco Polo series. It was strange at first half of Berlin was covered with advertising for the series, only to cancel it a short time later.
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Finally someone with taste! Gotta admit though, it took me a bit till I started to get really into it. Made me actually play as the Mongols in Age of Empires II.
 
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Hudo said:
Finally someone with taste! Gotta admit tough, it took me a bit till I started to get really into it. Made me actually play as the Mongols in Age of Empires II.
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I kind of liked that one right away. The 2 season was unfortunately a bit weaker, I really wanted to know how it continues. Well, I had to watch a documentary afterwards. It wasn't bad, but I would have preferred to see it as a very well produced series.
 
Spyxos said:
I kind of liked that one right away. The 2 season was unfortunately a bit weaker, I really wanted to know how it continues. Well, I had to watch a documentary afterwards. It wasn't bad, but I would have preferred to see it as a very well produced series.
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There was also the movie about Hundred-Eyes which was solid.
 
kruis said:
There are good shows on Prime:

The Boys
Marvelous Mss Maisel
Jack Reacher
Bosch
Jack Ryan
Terminal List
The Expanse
Man in the High Castle
Jeremy Clarkson's farming show
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The issue is actually while 9 those are ok they aren't blockbusters, most of everything else on prime is absolutely garbage
 
bitbydeath said:
People complain about Netflix but unlike most other services it excels at getting really good new content. Amazon doesn't have much outside of The Boys and Reacher.
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I'm not sure they're actually good at it, or simply that, as a showrunner you want the most people to watch your show, so your first pick is netflix.

Other services are either getting the content themselves make, stuff Netflix rejects or stuff they finance in order to get exclusivity (ie: not on netflix)
 
bitbydeath said:
People complain about Netflix but unlike most other services it excels at getting really good new content. Amazon doesn't have much outside of The Boys and Reacher.
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I thought netflix did original stuff that was good along time ago like house of cards before it went shit.

When was the last time they did something good?
 
Welcome to Hollywood, Amazon. Just "China it out" like other parts of Hollywood and core business model has revolved around.
 
The Expanse, The Boys and...
Yep thats it.
Hbo still king of quality content, Last of Us, Handmaids Tale, Succession and House of the Dragon. Goes to show what experience can do over just spending big money.
 
DKehoe said:
Citadel's budget is ridiculous, one of the most expensive shows ever. But I've not heard anyone say anything about it. It's like it doesn't exist. I'm guessing it's not great but I've got no impression of what it's meant to be like.
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That's more than $40M per episode - where the hell did that money go?
 
Hudo said:
Netflix cancelled Marco Polo, one of the few shows that I liked. So they can fuck off forever as far as I am concerned. Last good series I watched was Chernobyl.
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Marco Polo was very good. It still bugs me from time to time that they cancelled it. Wasn't a big factor because the actor playing Kublai Khan wanted to be in the MCU?
 
TheThreadsThatBindUs said:
No mentions of Vox Machina in this thread. Gaf you disappoint me.
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I liked the episodes of Critical Role I watched, but the show just felt bad when I watched it. The humor didn't land, like they were trying too hard. Maybe I'll revisit it sometime to see if enjoy later episodes.
 
BadBurger said:
I liked the episodes of Critical Role I watched, but the show just felt bad when I watched it. The humor didn't land, like they were trying too hard. Maybe I'll revisit it sometime to see if enjoy later episodes.
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First two episodes are cringe, but it settles down once the plot kicks in.
 
FireFistAce said:
Wasn't a big factor because the actor playing Kublai Khan wanted to be in the MCU?
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If that really is the case then that's even a sadder reason for why it got cancelled. I genuinely thought they cancelled it because it was too costly (same with HBO's/BBC's Rome, which was cancelled because it was expensive as fuck, which is why they compressed the hell out of the whole fall of the republic era)
 
Here is Amazon problem in two sentence.

You can't buy taste.
You can't force art.

They are giving way to much money to people with no track record. It is insane when you look at the CV of people involved in some of these shows.
Sure let's give a 450 Millions dollar show to people who wrote , let's see, ... , Godzilla vs. Kong and Jungle Cruise.
They have never directed anything before, let alone been showrunners of anything.

What kind of executive sign these checks, FFS.
 
Ballthyrm said:
Here is Amazon problem in two sentence.

You can't buy taste.
You can't force art.

They are giving way to much money to people with no track record. It is insane when you look at the CV of people involved in some of these shows.
Sure let's give a 450 Millions dollar show to people who wrote , let's see, ... , Godzilla vs. Kong and Jungle Cruise.
They have never directed anything before, let alone been showrunners of anything.

What kind of executive sign these checks, FFS.
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They were in a race and getting virtually free VC and gov money. The upper limit of streaming revenue is almost limitless, 8 BILLION people at $10-15/mo, so what's a few billion burned now? These guys just needed to stay ahead of ballooning interest payments.

But that balloon is full, possibly contracting, now, so the debts have come due. The talent has been stretched too thin, "they" shouldered aside solid, reliable performers in search of "new voices", started running everything through algorithms to make sure SOMETHING in EVERY show appealed to EVERYONE, but forgot that those fringe groups, while in aggregate a decent size, are just fractional splinters and not at all harmonious with each other. So they are shedding a majority audience in pursuit of 1% groups.

With the writers strike stopping all US based stuff, I think we will see a massive bidding war for asian content but even the most lavish production is a tiny cost of a Citadel or Rings of Power. They will be able to mine that stuff for a few years until the novelty wears off and hopefully by then we are back to properly balanced domestic shows.
 
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