From Bloomberg: Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending
Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy is taking a hard look at how much the company’s Hollywood studio spends on original TV programming. In recent weeks, he has asked executives for detailed budget analyses of some of their biggest shows, according to people familiar with the matter, scrutinizing the studio’s ballooning costs and mixed track record with audiences.
The world’s largest online retailer is engaged in a companywide cost-cutting program, with plans to eliminate at least 27,000 jobs. Across Amazon, Jassy has also jettisoned 37 different projects deemed unnecessary.
Later on down the page, there is this graph showing the difference in profits between 2013 and 2023:
Vaguely related:
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Seems a little silly to remove product that’s already made.Report
It seems to be some “Producers”-level stupid accounting on top but it’s probably a lot closer to “we’re cutting our losses and we can clawback some taxes by taking it off entirely”.
But the main reason that I am pleased to have Disney+ ain’t the new stuff. It’s Ducktales. Sweet, sweet Ducktales.Report
It’ll be amusing when they start using AI to edit old cartoons and remove any references to smoking, sexual assault, or capitalism. Each episode will end with Scrooge McDuck emptying out his money vault and declaring the gladness of spirit he feels at the opportunity to work in a coal mine and expiate his sin of usury.Report
We’ve already encountered the “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures” warning screen a couple of times and, each time, I made a joke to Maribou about “uh-oh, what do you think it’ll be?”
And then, about halfway through the show, we find ourselves saying “oh… THAT is why they put the warning there.”Report
It is always interesting to see how, in general, those warnings aren’t just “may contain scenes of dramatic tension” whiffery. Like when they tell you “this cartoon has got some racist stuff in it” they mean that the cartoon really does have some REALLY racist stuff in it…Report
There was one episode where the Beagle Brothers featured and part of their deal is how they’re constantly insulting each other.
“Mental Midget” showed up at some point and we both said “Ooooooooh”.
A later episode took place dealing with Aztec gold and there was a Spaniard Conquistador who was the antagonist and he ordered around the Native Americans still living around the various ruins. Even *I* said “Golly. 1987 was a long time ago.”Report
It also may eliminate the need to pay any royalties or licensing.Report
This seemed odd to me at first, too, but I think I see how it makes sense. You pay a flat fee for a streaming service, and they probably have some formula that decides how subscription revenues get split up depending on how many views a movie or episode gets.
I guess maybe they ran the numbers and did some projections and figured that those particular shows a) were not adding much revenue by attracting or retaining new subscribers, and b) were cannibalizing the viewership for content that allowed Disney to keep more of the money and pay out less in royalties.
Or maybe there was something in the contract that required Disney to pay just for having the content on their platform, regardless of whether/how much it was viewed.
I’m not sure which if either of these hypotheses is the actual reason; my main point is that there are plausible reasons it could make financial sense, and there’s really no way to know for sure without knowing the details of their contracts.Report
I think that Disney has been padding their studio revenues by having their streaming side overpay the production side for rights.
There’s a significant cultural backlash story going on that we really haven’t been talking about here.Report
I remember reading this Esquire story last year.
A cute, heartwarming story about Bezos talking about how he was a Tolkienhead and wanted Rings of Power to be good. I mean, really good.
From the article:
Now I never heard any stories about Bezos being put into the show as a cameo but looking at the numbers, I’m wondering whether the show counts as Bezos effing this up.
I read a number of stories about so-called “fans” of Lord of the Rings complaining about Rings of Power but it seems that the show kind of fizzled out despite the writers knowing better.Report
I feel like the issue with “Rings Of Power” was that they took a generic Girlboss Fantasy story and stuck bits of Middle-Earth lore into it.
Like, if they changed the names then it wouldn’t be recognizable as something that intended to be a story of Tolkein’s characters and world.
So it’s the same bait-and-switch as the “Starship Troopers” movies, where the big famous work turns out to be just an outfit worn by something completely different.
So, “did they F up”, that’s multiple questions with multiple answers. “Did they make a competent and enjoyable-in-itself high-budget fantasy TV miniseries”, yeah, it looks like it. “Did they do a good job of telling a story of Tolkein’s world and characters”, no, not really at all.Report
I don’t think you’re wrong but from what I’ve read there are serious questions about whether anything that costs what Rings of Power did to make will ever be profitable on a streaming platform. The concept in search of an audience wrapped up in the superficial trappings of a beloved property certainly don’t help but the larger story I think is how (apparently) possible it is to totally piss away huge amounts of VC cash.Report
The discourse around Rings of Power that I recall involved how they went out of their way to have a diverse cast. Black Elves! Black Dwarves! And people started complaining about the show and, wouldn’t know know it…
‘Rings of Power’ draws racist backlash and threats, but Amazon and Frodo stand behind it
The Rings of Power is suffering a racist backlash for casting actors of colour – but Tolkien’s work has always attracted white supremacists
‘Rings of Power’ calls out racism against cast members of color
And that’s what told me “okay, they’re talking about this instead of how much they hate NotCersei or how clever NotTyrion is or how NotJaime needs to take his shirt off more.”
And then, after the discourse about how racist the critics were flamed out, there wasn’t any discourse about the show at all.Report
The race of the various characters wouldn’t have mattered a whit had the writing been any good, the plot been at all logical or it had actually focused on the forging of the titular Rings of Power. Instead they managed to find five minutes during the season finale to slap the rings out on the side.Report
This! And I only saw snippets of the show from review vids. The acting sucked.Report
The acting was… eeeh… I mean everyone involved in the Galadriel main arc was working with absolute garbage scripts so they did what they could with the material at hand. The hobbit and dwarven side arcs did tolerably well acting wise because the material was respectively semi ok and almost solid for those two respective side arcs.
There was some very good elements. The world building wasn’t bad. Bear Mccreary’s music was fantastic. The portrayal of Khazad Dum as a living, breathing, dwarven city was hairs-on-the-arms-raising good and the portrayal of the barriers around Valinor (and the elven call and response that opened them) was flat out magical.
But for what Amazon paid for the show, the whole show needed to have that same magic from stem to stern and even then it might not have broken even but would have, at least, been an admirable and even laudable white elephant project. As it stands, RoP is a sick joke.Report
Well, I will tell you to play the Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War games.
You can get them both (with all DLC) from Steam for a freakin’ song ($10.49) during the Summer Sale.
The story is FREAKING AMAZING and has Middle Earth Moments that will have your jaw on the floor.
Wanna talk about the Rings of Power? You see a couple of cutscenes that detail out how a couple of the Nazgul transition from one of the Kings of Men into henchmen of The Witch-king of Angmar after getting some nice jewelry.
Goosebumps. Seriously.Report
I haven’t played them but I have read their synopsis and I found them quite clever. The idea that the player character wields the one ring against Sauron and is responsible for basically holding him at bay for centuries until he succumbs to the corruption is a clever one IIRC.Report
The culmination of the first game has your exceptionally powerful dude saying to your other exceptionally powerful dude “We need to make a new One Ring” and I wanted to stand up and start yelling at the television.
Because that is the worst idea I have ever heard and OH MY GOSH I COULD NOT WAIT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.Report
Peter Jackson did a good job, and brought in 3B dollars. Maybe, just maybe, Amazon should have tried to get a guy like him, or one with his capabilities.Report
There’s a sports stat called VORP, value over replacement player. It makes me think of two things: Was “Rings” better than it would have been if someone else had the rights? and would Amazon have made more money long-term if this had been a property other than Tolkien? I don’t see a strong argument in favor of either.Report
It’s also that change in profits. If you’re used to making more than $10B, heck. Why not let other folks get their beaks wet? It gives the folks at the top bragging rights and lets the executive producers give their own non-executive producers a little more leash to run around and do interesting stuff.
But if you’re used to making more than $10B and, suddenly, you’re making less than $5B, you don’t get to do that anymore. Quit trying to be interesting. Try to make something that will move product. “Our primary mission needs to be to entertain”, Iger said in one of those shareholder calls after one of the shareholders complained about some of the content of the last X years.
And there were a *TON* of ways that people read that statement.
The easiest one is “maybe that wasn’t our primary mission a year or two ago”.Report
There’s an element of Kremlinology in any story involving Iger, Chapek, or Iger.Report
Streaming services all run on content delivery networks. Tens to hundreds of copies of the content, carefully managed and located. Lots of dynamic stuff happening on both the front and back sides of the network. Space on CDNs is not cheap, and is a finite resource. Disney has a ton of per-subscriber data and can make reasonable judgements about which content is not “earning” its place, for whatever value of earn they happen to use.Report
I don’t really have a good sense of how much this costs, but the fact that YouTube is able to store vast amounts of low-value user-generated video content with only ad revenue to support it makes me question the idea that infrastructure costs are a major factor here.Report
Amazon made a Lord of the Rings show and told themselves–and everyone else–that it would be good.
But they were, all of them, deceived…Report
+1000!
The only thing I could reasonably be said to be a nerd about is Tolkien (my wife too). Our familiarity with the deceptions of the Enemy is why we weren’t tempted for even a second to hit play.Report
My perception of the show was deeply colored because I was working on my first reading of The Silmarillion when Rings hit. Maybe I would have liked the show better if I wasn’t so aware of how it played fast and loose with the Legendarium.Report
They did similar with Wheel of Time, from what I recall. I liked the show well enough, I guess. I had more questions than answers, though. All of my friends that had read the books were people that I talked to and, instead of telling me how great the show was, they told me about how it was falling short.
There needs to be a core group of folks that are evangelizing this stuff. If the WoTheads are explaining that, no, the show missed the mark then it’s going to fizzle.
SAY WHAT YOU WILL ABOUT GAME OF THRONESReport
I was pretty surprised the original Jackson trilogy was able to track to a not-totally-bastardized spirit of Tolkien and still make gobs and gobs of money. I’m not sure anyone could do it with all the fragments and whatever the proper word is for literary B sides from the cutting room floor that have been remastered and published over the years.Report
I think the Hobbit movies showed us how NOT to do it (and they were better than TRoP).
@Jaybird: I know that nobody liked the ending of GoT but I haven’t watched any of it. I’m holding out until GRRM gets around to finishing the book series.Report
The Hobbit movies were better?? Yikes.Report
Nobody liked the ending to GoT but I don’t know that I heard anybody complaining about how the show wasn’t faithful to what GRRM was going for.
I mean, up until Season 6 or 7, anyway.
I heard complaints about how the show wasn’t particularly “current year” (treatment of Sansa, hooters, whatnot) but it all was drowned out by stuff like “I can’t believe how much I hate (character)!” or “I can’t believe how they killed (character)!”Report
At some point the show outran what GRRM had written, so there was nothing to compare the show to. I’m to understand that the quality of the show plummeted once the show’s writers were on their own.Report
But it seemed like everyone got angry at Martin for not finishing it.Report
You’d think that “let’s do what the writer did, more or less” would have more fans among the executive producer set.
I mean, I understand why the writers would be against such an approach… but the guy calling the shots?
You’d think that he’d be tell the person hiring writers “get the ones who aren’t particularly creative”.Report
Aping what Martin did is pretty tough if you don’t have what Martin did to ape off of though.Report
The GoT discussion boards were *FULL* of absolutely *INSANE* theories about what would happen next.
Steal the best ones and say “this person was right!”
You don’t even have to give them credit!Report
*chuckles* Writers rooms are absolute nests of self dealing and nepotism. None of those head-up-their-posterior twits would ever countenance taking ideas from professionals, let alone trying to nap good material from the internet.Report
I think it gets worse when Uncle Sam is involved, and says, “This guy’s a writer. He’s on your show now.” No need to pay him, he’ll work for free.Report
Which is a shame, because any number of long-time high-fantasy fans could have written two last seasons that would have sent the audience away happy. All of the pieces were there.Report
Concurred, if anyone could have done it, some of the hard core fans could have.Report
The odd thing is that Amazon doesn’t own the rights to The Silmarillion so they can’t reference anything in it. They have rights to the Second Age material referenced in the LOTR, mainly the appendixes. The way they handled that in the LOTR trilogy was to not be inconsistent with the other material, but not directly use it. The closest they came was when Gandalf was sharing the names of the wizards he came to Middle Earth with, but when he came to the Blue Wizards, he said he had “quite forgotten their names.” The names are in some Christopher Tolkien edited materials so they couldn’t use it.
I may watch it some day, but I do wonder the point of paying for rights to something that wasn’t really usable in and of itself.Report
I’ve heard that, but I prefer to think of it as an urban myth. Because if it’s true, that makes this a $1 billion The Asylum movie.Report
Silmarillion profoundly affected my own outlook on fantasy. I read it young and it kindled a white hot burning love of world building in my heart. So I was especially appalled as I watched Rings of Power. Like, Nazi’s staring into the Arc of the Covenant levels of appalled.Report
At risk of damaging my own Tolkien fan bona fides I’ve never understood the desire to see anything deeper in the legendarium on screen. The works that are out there are interested IMO in two things, the first being Tolkien’s highly idiosyncratic linguistic project and the second, maybe, to evoke certain feelings in the reader arising from the je ne sais quoi of his faux history and metaphysics. What it conspicuously lacks is the kind of tightly crafted plot and well developed characters that are the stuff of mainstream cinema and TV. And that’s with whatever gloss and dot connecting (which for all we know may be extensive) that’s been done by Christopher Tolkien to render the work publishable. It’s never going to be made into something satisfactory for the screen. That anyone has ever considered it is a testament to how little hollywood producers understand the work.Report
Just to add, I think what I appreciate most about Tolkien’s work is the sense of wonder, and weird, primordial nostalgia it gives the reader for something that has never existed yet seems so familiar, like it must have. The mind can get really pleasantly lost in that. But I’m not sure you can produce it in a streaming, binge worthy format that makes a bunch of money for the investors no matter how much money you have. Even then it ends up being someone else’s (lowest common denominator) vision projected into whatever it is that makes Tolkien magical. There might not be a way to truly be faithful to a writing that I think its fans experience in such a very personal way.Report
The Rings of Power were aimed straight at a significant gap in Tolkeins legendarium wherein I think serious hay could productively be made. Talking about themes of entire elven societies recovering from PTSD from the rape of Beleriand; the realization of the fading of elven pride in Middle earth; the desperate grasping for powers to preserve the same and Sauron taking advantage of that to make a play for ultimate dominion and corruption? That’s good stuff. There was potential there, especially with the slow decline and corruption of Numenor as a backdrop and contrasting example of human corruption. Lost and wasted now.Report
From what I understand, Tolkien only named one of the Nazgul.
Just do a story of “here’s the other Nazgul, watch them fall”.
If you want a happy ending, show the elves talking about how awesome it’ll be when Tom Bombadil is finally awakened from his dark slumber or something.Report
I saw that analysis on Dark Lord Tom and laughed so hard because it made so much sense!!!Report
I think the Noldor saga in Beleriand could hold potential for a couple of epic movies. Luthiens’ mythos herself could be a whole film. But I agree that the larger mythos- the Valar, Arda’s genesis etc, would not make good TV or film.Report
I think the Noldor saga definitely could, in the right hands. My bet though is that the best possible version that would actually get made would be something on the level of the Underworld movies (which don’t get me wrong, have their place in the world but…). I suppose that’s more a criticism of Hollywood though than the possibilities of the text!Report
That’s plausible, and when you factor in how much money it takes to pry access to those rights from the estate I’d be confident saying that most of the economically feasible content has already been mined out of the body of work.Report
Children of Hurin is d.a.r.k. and could be done in a way like LoTR that situates it in a larger world without attempting to build the entire world.
Would be a sort of anti-LoTR to set the stage behind LoTR and the (shadow of the) evil they faced.
Main point is that the story already has the beats it needs for a trilogy and ‘all it would take’ would be appreciating the style of the morality tale it tells.
For anyone with the $Bs needed to pry it away from the estate, I’m available for a reasonable consulting fee.Report
I can’t imagine there’s enough Coke in the world to convince even the most encrusted exec to take a run at the Children of Hurin, especially since it’d require no small amount of the larger noldor back story.
And it just wouldn’t be economical.Report
Agree that Beren and Luthien would be a perfect tale for cinema.
Less sure about the Noldor Saga as it’s deeply tied to the creation myth and mythos and the trap would be seeing it as a plot driven adventure around ‘magic’ Silmarils.
I mean, it’s not impossible, but the obvious direction that Hollywood would take would, I think, make you feel that they had rather missed the point.Report
‘Missing the point’ is what the general expectation should be, which is why I’m in no rush to see any of it. In terms of getting Tolkien I think Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are probably the high water mark of what is possible in the real world, which was good enough for a solid (though kind of superficial) trilogy but not enough to save the Hobbit movies.Report
Ugh, the hobbit movies are so bad… just caught them again on HBO. Like every single ‘creative’ idea was calibrated to magnetic wrong.
But yes, I’m even less sanguine on LoTR than you guys… but of all the pre-LoTR tales, Beren/Luthien would probably be doable since its a love story, a clearly defined (smallish, but epic) adventure, and the Silmaril – in this case – truly is a macguffin. PLUS HUAN THE TALKING DOG.Report
Yeah Beren and Luthien is an area you could probably do a small focus film off of. But I cannot imagine it’d return the money necessary to cover production costs and the cost of licensing it from the estate.
And seconded on the Hobbit movies. They were an abomination that not even Morgoth could love.Report
The LOTR movies are all about calibrating expectations. There’s no way they weren’t going to be kind of shallow and pander to a bunch of moviegoer sensibilities fundamentally at odds with the underlying work. After all they were released as Christmas season blockbusters!
What they did do IMO was create a visualization of Middle Earth and its peoples that was hard to be upset with, execute the basic plot points, deliver reasonable approximations of the main characters, and keep most (certainly not all, but most) of the departures justifiable in the context of a different medium. Even moreso in the directors cuts.
Maybe I’m being overly generous but that’s about how I handicap it. Also they happened to come out at a time where my love of the Halfling’s leaf had absolutely dulled my mind but man did it make those visuals cool, while sitting with a few of my friends at a late evening showing.Report
Indiana Jones V lost its top spot on its fifth day of release to Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel’s anti sex trafficking biopic about a real hero who’s under 80 years old.Report
From my time in the merger-and-acquisition phase of the cable industry, there is an attitude generally summarized as “content is king”. Basically, the high-ups want to hang out with the glitteratti. Me, I was interested in building the best damned delivery system in the world and it quit being fun once the top brass weren’t interested in that.
On the content side, it’s possible to drop a billion dollars and get almost nothing. On the delivery system side, it’s hard to spend a billion dollars and not get major improvements, or at least expanded reach. Bezos made his money on logistics (of various sorts). It was probable that at some point he was going to realize just how much cash the content piece of the business could burn.Report