Amazon wants its own
hit.
HBO
A strategy overhaul is underway at Amazon Studios, and it comes
all the way from top brass including CEO Jeff Bezos,
according to a new report from Variety.
This week, Amazon unexpectedly killed the second season of “Z:
The Beginning of Everything,” which had been previously greenlit,
and which writers had been working to get ready for production.
The cancellation comes as part of a mandate from the leadership
in Seattle.
“We’ve been looking at the data for some time, and as a team
we’re increasingly focused on the impact of the biggest shows,”
Amazon Studios head Roy Price
told Variety. “It’s pretty evident that it takes big shows to
move the needle.”
Price pointed to Amazon Prime Video hits like “Man in the High
Castle,” and car series “The Grand Tour” (from the “Top Gear”
team), as examples of what Amazon is looking for. He also
mentioned “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 said. “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.”
This isn’t the first time Amazon Studios execs have talked
about focusing on big shows. In April,
Price said Amazon’s “real focus is the crème de la crème …
[the] actual shows people are talking about.” And late last year,
he said that “the real competition [in streaming TV] is not
to be broadly accepted, but to be truly exceptional.”
But it seems Price is getting pressure to move faster in that
direction.
Sources told Variety that there is some internal frustration with
Amazon’s original TV output. Amazon has had critical darlings
come out of its TV division, like Golden Globe winners
“Transparent” and “Mozart in the Jungle.” But for all the money
it’s spending on video,
which JPMorgan estimated to be $4.5 billion in 2017, Amazon
doesn’t yet have a culture-dominating drama like “Game of
Thrones.”
It sounds like Jeff Bezos has noticed.
“We’re very interested in getting those top shows — something
that is broadly popular and admired,”
Price told Variety. “We want to allocate a lot of our
attention and resources going forward to that kind of thing.”
