The single most expensive TV show of all time
Studios regularly spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie was a ludicrous prospect 30 years ago, but things have advanced so rapidly and become so expensive that investing such vast sums has long since become the norm, and that even applies to TV now, too.
A combination of the prestige TV era and the unstoppable rise of streaming has seen the various studios, networks, and platforms whip out the chequebook in an effort to secure the hottest new properties, which in turn has seen production costs skyrocket.
Compared to the raft of Marvel Cinematic Universe shows that have cost upwards of $200million for the sake of airing exclusively on Disney Plus, Game of Thrones setting HBO back a princely $15m per episode is quaint by comparison. Even at that, they’ve got nothing on the most expensive series of all time.
Even though it was proven quite clear by The Hobbit that not even Peter Jackson could replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the rights to the disparate elements of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology being scattered to the four winds encouraged the development of a standalone adaptation, with Amazon Studios leading the charge.
The end result was The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a perfectly adequate and fitfully thrilling episodic fantasy that was hardly reflective of the exorbitant cost. Amazon committed to a multi-season order in a deal that could set it back anywhere up to a billion dollars in the long run, with the first eight-episode run racking up an estimated $450m tab.
That only covers the production budget itself, too, which means the initial $250m Amazon splurged to secure the rights in the first place isn’t even included in that figure. The Rings of Power hardly captured the zeitgeist in the same way Jackson’s seminal trio of feature films did, not that the top brass were willing to admit as much.
Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke told Variety the studio was “building infrastructure for five seasons”, meaning “we were always going to spend what we needed to spend to get it right”. Despite being lauded as Prime Video’s most-watched original series ever, data uncovered by The Hollywood Reporter revealed that only 37% of viewers in the United States and 45% of subscribers located internationally watched the whole thing from start to finish.
Salke maintains that it was “all money really well spent”, but at an average cost of $58m per episode, it remains to be seen if The Rings of Power will justify it in the long run. The second season will be a true barometer of its prospects, but with the cast and majority of integral crew members already signed to contracts and many of the sets having been built previously, it could at least come in a fraction cheaper.
