Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon. He is very rich. He is very powerful, and he’s reportedly a fan of genre fiction (or of Star Trek, at least). He’s also trying to raise the profile of Amazon’s original video service. To that end, he recently cancelled a couple of the service’s smaller dramas, created a unit focused on sci-fi and fantasy, and gave new marching orders to Roy Price, the (now disgraced and out-of-work) head of Amazon Studios. What does Bezos want? To have the next Game of Thrones.
“I do think ‘Game of Thrones’ is to TV as ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars’ was to the movies of the 1970s,” Price told Variety. “It’ll inspire a lot of people. Everybody wants a big hit and certainly that’s the show of the moment in terms of being a model for a hit.”
The biggest shows make the biggest difference around the world. If you have one of the top five or 10 shows in the marketplace, it means your show is more valuable because it drives conversations and it drive subscriptions. … We’re a mass-market brand. We have a lot of video customers and we need shows that move the needle at a high level.
Now, it sounds like Amazon may have gotten its wish, as Variety reports that the company is in talks with Warner Bros. Television and the estate of author J.R.R. Tolkien to adapt The Lord of the Rings as a television show.
The Lord of the Rings, of course, is the granddaddy of all high fantasy series, and an enormous inspiration on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. Talks are still in the early stages, but Bezos himself is apparently involved in negotiations, so you know it’s a priority. According to Deadline, the Tolkien Estate approached both Netflix and HBO with this idea as well, although HBO reportedly passed. I guess they already have their Game of Thrones-sized hit?
The question now becomes: Can a Lord of the Rings TV show even be a Game of Thrones-sized hit? It’s certainly sweeping and detailed, but not to the extent of A Song of Ice and Fire, and it doesn’t deal as directly with violence or sex. There’s also the fact that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was adapted into a series of three highly successful, critically acclaimed movies back in the early ’00s. (And then The Hobbit, the series’ precursor book, was adapted into a series of three terrible movies a decade later, but we don’t need to think about that.) Are viewers ready for a new version of the story?
Sean Astin, the guy who played Samwise Gamgee in the movies, seems to think so. But I’m not sure. The Lord of the Rings certainly has name recognition, but while there’s enough material there to fill out a series of movies, there may not be enough for a full-fledged TV series. And if you want an example of what can happen when money-hungry producers stretch out a story unnecessarily, just look at The Hobbit films, which are, as mentioned above, terrible.
There’s also this: Can Amazon really expect to find a Game of Thrones-sized hit by chasing Game of Thrones’ success? Part of the reason Thrones was a hit was because it was unlike anything that had come before — TV fanatics didn’t know they need a gritty, sprawling take on high fantasy full of brutality and political intrigue until they got it — and because it was allowed to grow organically. I tend to think the next big thing in TV will come from somewhere no one expects, rather than from imitating the last big thing.
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h/t Variety
