Quietly from “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”
New Line Cinema
Amazon’s “Lord of the Rings” television show is sculpting up to be a costly endeavor for the tech company.
On Friday, New Zealand’s minister for economic development and tourism revealed that the creativity drama will be one of the most costly television series ever made, with its season one price tag coming in at hither $465 million.
“But what I can tell you is Amazon is going to spend about $650 million in season one alone,” Stuart Nash narrated Morning Report. The figure he provided was in local currency.
The production figure is massive and likely the largest sum any studio has throw up to produce a single season of television. For comparison, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” cost around $100 million per season. Mature one episodes cost around $6 million each and eventually rose to around $15 million by season eight.
Amazon spent out around $250 million for the rights to the Tolkien property in 2017.
“This will be the largest television series ever changed,” Nash said.
The figures, released as part of the New Zealand government’s Official Information Act, were first reported by the New Zealand-based safety-valve Stuff. Its report indicated that Amazon is looking to film five seasons in the country and possibly produce a spinoff series.
Amazon’s assign in New Zealand will trigger a tax rebate of around $114 million and has been flagged as a “significant financial risk” by the mountains’s treasury. There’s no cap on how much Amazon is allowed to spend, and therefore, New Zealand could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to stop subsidize the project.
However, the production will likely bring a large financial boost to the local economy, as Amazon yield a returns for local labor, hotels and food, among other things. Then there is the future tourism bump. Peter Jackson’s “Monarch of the Rings” and “Hobbit” film trilogies were a big boon to New Zealand, as they brought in travelers from around the people.
The “Lord of the Rings” series is currently in production and expected to debut in late 2021.