Amazon Threw Money at Lord of the Rings
Amazon Studios is reportedly spending a little under half a billion dollars to produce the first season of its upcoming Lord of the Rings series. Though the series’ $465 million price tag reflects the inordinate amount of time, energy, and labor that’s going to be necessary to bring a live-action series set in Middle-earth to life, it’s also the latest instance of Amazon throwing its vast sums of capital around to cement its place within an industry quite separate from its core retail and web infrastructure businesses. It’s impossible to talk about Lord of the Rings without understanding the series as being part of Amazon Studios’ growing presence in the media production business, and how that presence is only possible thanks to Amazon’s vast sums of ill-gotten cash that has come at the expense of workers’ lives. It feels like this foray into Lord of the Rings is a brute force attempt at crafting a cultural phenomenon, that Amazon thinks that making its production more expensive is somehow going to win audiences over. But the truth is that we’ve been there and back again, already.
