Last week, we learned that e-commerce giant Amazon, headed by $125 billion man Jeff Bezos, was going to spend $500 million on making two seasons of a Lord of the Rings TV show. Shocked and appalled, we stared with mouths agape, marveling that HBO only spent $100 on season 6 of Game of Thrones, its most expensive yet, and that only after the show had been around a while and proven its worth. What excess! What vanity! Surely it was not to be borne!
Well, it ends up that Amazon was just getting started. Now, the Financial Times reports that the company is going spend freaking $1 billion on a three-season adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, a popular science fiction novel series by author Liu Cixin.
We were so naive last week.
Already, several outlets are portraying this move as Amazon’s “answer” to Game of Thrones. That’s a comparison Bezos invited last year, when he ordered his company’s video arm to focus less on small scale dramas like Transparent and more on science fiction/fantasy/genre shows, the better to bring in lots of different kinds of viewers. Basically, the order boiled down to, “Bring me the next Game of Thrones.” Not long after that, the Lord of the Rings show was announced. And now The Three-Body Problem, about an alien race preparing to invade Earth and the various reactions people have to it.
According to the Times, some insiders think that The Three-Body Problem could end up being even bigger than Thrones, thus justifying the high price tag, but you wouldn’t guess that by looking at the numbers. While the English-language version Problem, released in 2014, sold decently, the novel made a bigger splash in China, where it’s been in stores since 2008. We should also note that The Three-Body Problem is the title of the first book in a trilogy called Remembrances of Earth’s Past, but fans usually refer to the whole thing as The Three-Body Problem. (It’s not unlike how some fans refer to the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire as “the Game of Thrones books.”) We’re guessing that Amazon’s $1 billion pitch is for all three books, one per season.
Anyway, with all these big ticket shows on the way, Amazon seems bound and determined to sit the genre television throne after Game of Thrones vacates it in 2019. Is the war over before it begins?
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