Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio To Explain Its Big Spending (bloomberg.com) 110
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is taking a hard look at how much the company's Hollywood studio spends on original TV programming. From a report: In recent weeks, he has asked executives for detailed budget analyses of some of their biggest shows, according to people familiar with the matter, scrutinizing the studio's ballooning costs and mixed track record with audiences. The world's largest online retailer is engaged in a companywide cost-cutting program, with plans to eliminate at least 27,000 jobs. Across Amazon, Jassy has also jettisoned 37 different projects deemed unnecessary.
The Hollywood studio, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on original programming over the last decade, is an obvious place to look for savings. Last year, Amazon spent $7 billion on original shows, licensed programs and sports, up from $5 billion the year before. Only Netflix and Disney spend more on streaming. In the past nine months, Amazon has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to deliver huge audiences. Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral all cost more than $100 million to produce but failed to crack Nielsen's list of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US. Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience, failed to hold on to most of its viewers over the course of the season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The Hollywood studio, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on original programming over the last decade, is an obvious place to look for savings. Last year, Amazon spent $7 billion on original shows, licensed programs and sports, up from $5 billion the year before. Only Netflix and Disney spend more on streaming. In the past nine months, Amazon has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to deliver huge audiences. Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral all cost more than $100 million to produce but failed to crack Nielsen's list of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US. Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience, failed to hold on to most of its viewers over the course of the season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Change strategy then (Score:5, Insightful)
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Didn't have to alienate though... (Score:1)
they only had the rights to a small part of the source material, so they had to create new characters and story elements to move things along. So, pretty much right off the bat they alienated most of the hardcore Tolkien fanbase.
Even having to make things up though, they could have done this in a way that was appealing to fans.
What they did with the early Hobbits was atrocious and made no sense.
Female dwarfs without beards, unthinkable transgression.
Re:Didn't have to alienate though... (Score:4, Interesting)
When your main character jumps off a boat in the middle of the ocean with the intent of "I'll just swim back" because some idiot wanted a cliff hanger at the end of the episode to fit in with the half-brained metaphor they set up at the beginning of the episode, you know it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Yes that was a great example... (Score:1)
When your main character jumps off a boat in the middle of the ocean with the intent of "I'll just swim back" because some idiot wanted a cliff hanger at the end of the episode
Even for some super-elf, what were they thinking with that one? How does such a totally out of bounds idea make it into a final show with that kind of budget?
It just had problems of that magnitude at all levels.
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So, pretty much right off the bat they alienated most of the hardcore Tolkien fanbase.
Which was one more straw to break the camel's back. Because Tolkien fans are pretty much the only ones who give a shit about the whole lore around middle earth. For anyone just wanting a fantasy story, this could be set in some D&D-esque backdrop and they could have saved a lot of money on IP.
Re:Change strategy then (Score:4, Funny)
I think their thinking was that if it didn't have the LotR name on it, they wouldn't be able to justify how much they were spending because far fewer people would watch it.
Even the Tolkien fans who hated it still watched it to make sure they hated it I guess?
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That would explain why only about 30% of the people who started it stuck to it. Tolkien fans that saw the first, got the confirmation that it's crap and didn't look back.
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I enjoyed reading the LOTR and The Hobbit, but gave up a few episodes into the show. It just wasn't very well written, failing to engage the viewer and make them care about the characters and events on screen.
They clearly threw a lot of money at the production, but apparently not at the writing.
Re: Change strategy then (Score:2)
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No.
I'm a Tolkien fan: I enjoyed the Silmarillion.
I watched it (of course). The problem wasn't the source material they had access to. The Silmarillion is far too sprawling to be captured and it's more like a plot summary in book form. It's absolutely 100% fine to concentrate on a small segment of time and expand it out as necessary. Good, even.
The problem was it was just bad TV in a number of normal, boring, work-a-day ways, mostly involving having a dreadful script. I watched the first few episodes and the
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This LotR monstrosity can go die in the flames of Udun, and I'm happy that it's being an expensive lesson. Make fewer series, make things that people want to watch, and don't shit on superb quality material.
You left out the most important piece that they need to have drilled into their heads: "Make series that have self contained seasons!!!"
The risk of a series being cancelled is just way too high. So high that I (and I am sure plenty of others) don't bother watching until the entire series is complete. Now, I realize that by doing this it lowers the chances of the series being renewed and especially completed. Oh well, been burned TOO many times. There are better things I can do with my time than to watch a s
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Weird, not positive what happened to the end of my sentence, but I believe palm detection didn't detect my palm and it was wiped out.
It should have read:
"If they make their series in such a way that each season is self contained and completely resolved, then I am more than happy to watch. American Horror Story is a good example of this, and Black Mirror is another example, with each episode being self contained. They could also come up with sort of guarantee that a series will be completed -- however, I rea
Re: Change strategy then (Score:2)
Unlikely. The Rings of Power was expensive, but I think more than half the expense was the license. That's paid already. In addition tons of the design work is done already for the first season. Unless they were planning on introducing tons of new concepts (later Southerlings, e.g.) the remaining seasons should be way cheaper.
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I liked the LOTR show and hope they do another season. Was it amazing? No but it was fun to watch and I enjoyed it. Of course, I can't recite back Tolkien and don't really care what they changed from source.
The Wheel of Time on the other hand was downright painful garbage. I of course could also recite the books and expected a 1:1 adaptation.
So I get the hate against LOTR because that's how I feel about what they did to WOT. If I was rich enough, I would have WOT done precisely like the book was done and as
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oh sweet jesus even on the sliding scale of bad trolling this is bad
who finds this funny? this is like the level of hack comedian pulled off the stage with a big hook
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I ask myself the same question about woketards every day. Are they trolling with 72 genders?
That's a good question. I haven't actually seen the people you mention bring up 72 genders.
If me repeating your rules back to you sounds like a joke then maybe that tells you something?
Your trolling doesn't have a strong grip, although I admit it may turn out to be unwise of me to help you tune your technique.
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senile Biden
Oh, so the guy that beat your guy straight up in a nationwide election, and then delivered on major policy goals such as infrastructure, on-shoring tech manufacturing, climate action, and reducing inflation; and also took the GOP congressional leadership for a ride and fleeced them on the debt ceiling negotiations?
If he's able to get all that done while "senile" it doesn't say good things for your chosen tribe of losers, who repeatedly lose to him and his party.
Of the G7 countries, the US has had the best G
Biden Reducing Inflation (Score:3)
Thanks, I needed a laugh.
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Thanks for admitting that you have nothing, and that your claims on Biden's mental competence are total horseshit that isn't backed up by literally anything.
You can criticize his policies. You can criticize the fact that he's been in Washington since Nixon was President. You can criticize the fact that he's really old, which is definitely an issue from a general health perspective. But don't just parrot made-up shit that anyone with 10 working brain cells can tell is made-up bullshit. And then go find a
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Thanks for admitting that you have nothing, and that your claims on Biden's mental competence are total horseshit that isn't backed up by literally anything.
You can criticize his policies. You can criticize the fact that he's been in Washington since Nixon was President. You can criticize the fact that he's really old, which is definitely an issue from a general health perspective. But don't just parrot made-up shit that anyone with 10 working brain cells can tell is made-up bullshit. And then go find a candidate that isn't just as old but also a twice-indicted fat fuck grifter that wants to do away with democracy when he loses.
The Republican party and Schrödinger's Joe Biden. A man who is simultaneously a doddering old senile fool and a masterful strategic genius behind all evil.
Biden is a goofball, and has always been a goofball. Tough. It is his shtick. He lulls the republicans to sleep as they try to attack him on whatever they come up with - his age? - then swoops in with something needed. Bloody hell, my dear MAGAs, he's only a couple years older than the man you have pledged your life to, the man who has committed es
Re: Change strategy then (Score:3)
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To be fair, more people voted against Trump than for Biden.
That's a fair insight. However, arguably the key reason Trump was elected in 2016 was the huge number of voters voting against Hillary as well as sitting out the election because they couldn't stomach either Trump or Hillary.
The biggest thing going for Biden in 2024 is that Trump is still one of the two most disliked presidential candidates ever. Unfortunately for Trump, he doesn't get to run against the other most disliked candidate.
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A distinction without a difference in the end. I'm not a huge Biden fan, but I also like living in a democracy that can tell it's leader to go the fuck away if we collectively don't agree with what they are trying to do. So by default, Trump can go fuck himself all the way to federal prison.
Re:Change strategy then (Score:5, Interesting)
The producer didn't get the rights to adopt The Silmarillion, which covers the first 2 Ages of Arda. What they did get is the 20 pages of appendix from The Lord of the Rings. Since they cannot adopt The Silmarillion, they just went ahead and invent storylines out of whole cloth, with rather predictable result.
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Correction, The Silmarillion covers the whole Arda ages. They want to do the 2nd Age, most of which is in The Silmarillion.
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Yes, they made it up, which is perhaps understandable. If you're supposed to make a series and you don't have the rights to the material, there's no choice really than to make stuff up.
Still, that could be GOOD stuff, if the writing was good, the characters were decent, and it meshed with what we've already seen of middle earth.
It wasn't.
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Yes, they made it up, which is perhaps understandable. If you're supposed to make a series and you don't have the rights to the material, there's no choice really than to make stuff up.
Still, that could be GOOD stuff, if the writing was good, the characters were decent, and it meshed with what we've already seen of middle earth.
It wasn't.
Yes, it could have been good. But they really wrecked the characters.
One of the strangest things about so many in Hollywood today is that they have a weird desire to deconstruct beloved characters.
The Harfoots is one. They kind of made them assholes.
But there is the crime of what they did to Galadriel. The super-chill but among the most powerful of any of the creatures in The Tolkien universe, they tried to masculinize her into something that was probably designed to appeal to some subset of modern
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The producer didn't get the rights to adopt The Silmarillion, which covers the first 2 Ages of Arda. What they did get is the 20 pages of appendix from The Lord of the Rings. Since they cannot adopt The Silmarillion, they just went ahead and invent storylines out of whole cloth, with rather predictable result.
The Silmarillion is the definition of unfilmable. Go ahead and write a 120 page screenplay (two hours) and see how that turns out.
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It doesn't make any sense to try to film "THE SILMARILLION", but you could reasonably make stories based on the events outlined in it and at least they might make some kind of sense. You could have a whole series of films, and call them tales of The Silmarillion (or more likely, tales of Tolkien) but they can't, because they can't get the rights to do so.
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The complaint is not that they did not film the Silmarillion. The complaint is since they did not get the rights, they basically ignored the backstory in the Silmarillion and made up their own stories.
And they ignored the post story as well.
And fired Tom Shippey to boot. Can't have a Tolkien scholar telling them what to do.
Re:Change strategy then [SPOILERS] (Score:5, Informative)
Galadriel is presented as a sort of impetuous teenager - despite being thousands of years old and known in the original material for her wisdom. She and her party (after a meaningless climb in an ice storm) were almost trashed by a troll. What would they have done if they actually had caught up with Sauron? Also WTF was her jumping off a ship in the middle of the ocean, and how on middle earth did that particular character just happen to be on a boat in that part of the ocean at the time???
Numinor in the books is the greatest of human civilizations, eventually brought down by its pride in its own magnificence when it challenges the gods themselves. Here the great army of Numinor is a few hundred guys on horses on 5 ships? A massive error or scale. And then in a painfully bad bit of plotting they show up exactly when needed almost to the second, - after months of travel?
Who built the magic sword is a key to turn lock that detonates Mt Doom thing? I mean what? why? What was the point?
In the books Gandalf and the other wizards were sent to middle earth by the Valar (gods). Why arrive with amnesia? What was the point of that?
Meanwhile we are all waiting for Durin's Bane to go stomping all over Khazad Dum , and they tease us with hints of a Balrog for severl episodes then never put it in play. Holding out for season 2 I guess, but why?
It was visually pretty but that was all it had going for it. Bad plot, mediocre acting and characters. A generic swords / sorcery series, though no match for say The Witcher. But they sold it using the Tolkien name, and spend some absurd amount of money filming it. If they couldn't get rights to the Silmarillion, fine, do something else. Bloodstone. Elric, there is lots of great swords / sorcery fantasy out there. Let the Tolkien family sit clutching their precious.
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Galadriel is presented as a sort of impetuous teenager - despite being thousands of years old and known in the original material for her wisdom. She and her party (after a meaningless climb in an ice storm) were almost trashed by a troll. What would they have done if they actually had caught up with Sauron?
I agree that was annoying but a common enough trope in fantasy and sf. Long lived beings tend to have the maturity of their human aged counterparts.
Also WTF was her jumping off a ship in the middle of the ocean, and how on middle earth did that particular character just happen to be on a boat in that part of the ocean at the time???
Considering the character may make more sense.
Numinor in the books is the greatest of human civilizations, eventually brought down by its pride in its own magnificence when it challenges the gods themselves. Here the great army of Numinor is a few hundred guys on horses on 5 ships? A massive error or scale.
I think it was largely volunteers, and they're definitely on that plot path.
In the books Gandalf and the other wizards were sent to middle earth by the Valar (gods). Why arrive with amnesia? What was the point of that?
Being send to Middle Earth in probably different physical form is traumatic, I don't mind him being disoriented for a while.
I think the real issue isn't quite any of those things, but scale in general. What LOTR did so well was convey a huge
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What would they have done if they actually had caught up with Sauron?
I had the same question about the cave troll in Moria. "Um, Gandalf, bit of help here...?"
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Meanwhile we are all waiting for Durin's Bane to go stomping all over Khazad Dum , and they tease us with hints of a Balrog for severl episodes then never put it in play. Holding out for season 2 I guess, but why?
I agree with you, but teasing with a Balrog does not makes sense at all. Gimli was surprised when he found Moria to be abandoned. It was at the end of the third era. How come that he didn't know?
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To be fair, the dwarves delving too deep and waking something in the darkness is not incompatible with the Balrog already being in Moria from a previous age.
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Who built the magic sword is a key to turn lock that detonates Mt Doom thing? I mean what? why? What was the point?
When doesn't want a demon skull complete with volcano key to decorate their small fortress. Very second age chic.
Meanwhile we are all waiting for Durin's Bane to go stomping all over Khazad Dum , and they tease us with hints of a Balrog for severl episodes then never put it in play. Holding out for season 2 I guess, but why?
Well, they didn't delve too greedily and too deep, they dropped a leaf
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"Galadriel is presented as a sort of impetuous teenager - despite being thousands of years old and known in the original material for her wisdom. "
While Galadriel is thousands of years old in The Rings of Power, and even then likely the oldest Calquendi remaining in Middle Earth, she is thousands of years *younger* than when we see her in The Lord of the Rings. She had a reputation for being ambitious, though not as reckless as Feanor, e.g she joins the Flight of the Noldor, but she does not take Feanor's O
Re:Change strategy then (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm angry at the disappointment that the series was, but I'm more angry that such an attempt with such a big budget on the particular world/age is not likely to happen again, for a long while, and it's something that I've been dreaming and hoping for since I read the Silmarillion, even before Peter Jackson's movies came out
Maybe we'll see some good adaptations in 20 years if the world still exists, when the copyrights to Silmarillion expire.
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They waited until Christopher Tolkien is dead and buried. The rest of the Tolkien family didn't have his reverence for the source material, they just want a big check.
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If you'd read some of the magnificent stories contained in the original source materials, and known about how anal Tolkien was with the consistency of his world, you would too be filled with rage
I'm still filled with rage from the original trilogy from that scene where Denethor is eating cherry tomatoes. Aside from him being a very messy eater, tomatoes are from the Americas and Tolkein edited them out from early editions. On the other hand, I think he kept in references to potatoes. Either way, just watching him eat is enough by itself.
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If you'd read some of the magnificent stories contained in the original source materials, and known about how anal Tolkien was with the consistency of his world, you would too be filled with rage.
I've not read the source material nor do I know about it, and I was filled with rage anyway. This show was insanely poorly written with a plot and characters that didn't make any sense. It's one thing to piss off a couple of nerdy Tolkien fanbois, that would still ultimately generate a shitload of revenue, but this seemingly pissed off everyone. It was just bad. Simply bad. Forget the source material, if it had stayed true to it you'd be equally angry about how they turned it into something bad.
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While I, as you, would love if it was possible, I firmly contend that there is no way to capture The Silmarillion on screen. The scale is simply too huge.
A spider so large that her size is compared to the mountains she walks across.
Battlefields so large that half the army rushes into the fray three days late because they didn't yet realize their comrades had run in a half-week earlier.
The first dragon is so large that every other dragon in fiction (including in the remainder of Tolkein's lore) looks like a
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I’ll admit they spent too much money but it wasn’t that bad.
I never read the source material, but seriously? The story was utter garbage. Even if it weren't based on some established law the process the characters went through logically made no sense what so ever. You could see time and time again amateur writers not planning ahead, writing themselves into a corner, and then having to make dumbarse decisions to get the story to progress. The story had multiple moments of deus ex machina. People are writing damn dissertations on just how bad the writing was for this
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Works on my machine.
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Define "broken": Right now Twitter has more readers than ever.
Re: Did anyone ask Elon Musk why he broke Twitter? (Score:2)
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You don't want to waste your precious few twitter.com visits on something unimportant. In fact, better not to yet, just in case there's something better later.
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Broken as in they disabled the ability to browse without logging in. Which was a huge part of what made Twitter different.
Not only that, but many social media sites quote Twitter inline, and those quotes are now broken. Those quotes now act like paywalled sites.
I've already gotten in the habit of just ignoring any post that quotes Twitter.
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No complaints from me. No news on the airhead are good news.
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As I was saying before being modded down...
Did anyone ask Elon Musk why he broke Twitter?
As in lately.
Cause there's like half a dozen user Firehose submissions about it, and yet Slashdot remains silent about the latest Musko fiasco of the artist currently known as the former genius. [theguardian.com]
Why wasn't any one of those submissions posted on the front page? Or why didn't the Slashdot staff do it on their own?
Hollywood accounting (Score:2)
They’re using the time honored Hollywood accounting method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Hollywood accounting (Score:2)
By whom?
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Liberals
Depends on what you mean by liberal.
Woke mafia
Can't say I've ever run into any.
California
Given I live here, yes. They tax the shit out of you, and nobody has any idea what they do with it afterwards. Everything here is either broken or just plain doesn't work. And even if you have a very good income, you still can't afford to buy a house, mainly because that's exactly how the politicians want it. There's a term they use: BANANA. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. The typical house here is older than boomers and e
What about lord of the rings? (Score:3)
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What about lord of the rings? I'm sure that's pretty popular.
You'd be wrong. It didn't even break into the top 10 of streaming shows for 2022. Only 37% of US viewers that watched the first episode completed the series. Those are some pretty horrific stats considering the budget of this series, and the massive advertising money and clout that Amazon threw behind it.
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/l... [denofgeek.com]
Giant Loss (Score:1)
What about lord of the rings?... I'm sure that's pretty popular.
It was very badly done and often boring to boot, as a result it lost a lot of viewers [fandomwire.com] after the first few episodes, and cost almost a billion to make so pretty sure that was a negative ROI.
You do indeed have to spread around funds to try and make something people want to watch. But Amazon doens't seem to have had any luck yet in making tentpole originals that attract people the way Game of Thrones did for HBO, or Stranger Things did for Netfli
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On the other hand, Amazon is buying rights to sports, which are so extravagant they can only be seen as loss leaders to gain subscribers. It is money down the drain.
EXPLAIN! (Score:5, Funny)
CEO: Explain your big spending!
Studio: Your CFO gave us a budget, we spent the budget.
CEO: What if we cut your budget by 50%!!!???
Studio: Then we would spend that.
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I don't understand the point of amazon prime anymore. The fast shipping (1-day!) is now "whenever it shows up."
The shows are hot garbage in general with few that I want to see and the ones I do want to see take forever to get seasons (looking at you wheel of time circa Nov '21). When I look at what they have i'm like... who wants to watch this garbage? Their big ticket item citadel is hot garbage and completely unrelatable half way through the pilot, and it doesn't get better after a few episodes. No thanks
ROTFLMAO (Score:2)
Quote: "Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience,"
Nothing more to add.
Content as a commodity... (Score:2)
Amazon cannot produce a good TV show the same way they low cost shower curtain. Algorithms can generate content all day but groundbreaking entertainment requires
Cost cutting? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm presuming this CEO, and others like him, will have their salaries cut, bonuses stopped, and other perks significantly pared back. Lead by example and all that.
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If he kills Rings of Power ALONE, he's earned his bonus and the appreciation of all Tolkien fans.
If he happens to kill the ridiculously woke Wheel of Time series, that wouldn't be bad either.
I know...maybe just make a series based on the BOOKS, not primarily around delivering an agenda?
Hollywood Culture (Score:2)
mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon's big mistake is having a HOLLYWOOD studio. That would be like Elon Musk deciding to base Tesla in Detroit.
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I am not sure I agree. Certainly Tinsel how has a huge problem with unions. They are blood suckers that make getting anything done expensive and slow. This is why you see so much production of things like commercials (for the American market) now being moved to Mexico.
That works for ads, and it may work for low-art television type products like sit-coms, cop-dramas, etc. For big budget movie and mini-series products, names matter. Having a list of A-list and B-list celebs attached to your project may mak
Mrs. Maisel was fantastic (Score:2)
Advertising? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have heard of The Peripheral mostly by accident, and watched it, it's not bad. It needs a little work tightening up the storyline, but it is worth watching. I somehow never heard of Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, or Dead Ringers. I don't think I saw any of those names when I fired up the app either. Maybe they need to do a better job of promiting their own stuff, possibly just using their own platform. They should also probably drop the weekly release thing and use a viewership metric that isn't tied to who views immediately. Now that the pandemic is over, I don't have time, mental bandwidth or interest in watching slow release shows. Often there's something I saw that I might like, realized it's not fully released and move on, forgetting about it the next day (ex. Citadel).
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I also enjoyed "The Peripheral", though it was slow at times and your commentary also holds. Citadel was pretty good. I also recommend "Upload" (if you're into comedies) and, obviously, "The Expanse".
pivot to profit (Score:2)
It makes sense; they can't just hemorrhage money forever.
Wife has Netflix, and I have to say, I'd never heard of any of the shows referenced in TFA except Rings of Power. We tried to watch it and gave up on the third episode. Never mind it pretty much screws Tolkien's mythology, but it could still be watchable were it written well. And it wasn't.
Word is, it started with high numbers, but only 37% of those viewers saw it to completion. For a billion dollar franchise, that's ... not good. And I just get
Rings of Power is still on? (Score:3)
I have an Amazon Prime sub. I have NEVER seen it. Like, ever. And I don't mean watch it. I have not SEEN it on the Prime screen. One should think that they feature that thing prominently somewhere, or bother you with ads for it (it's not like they're shy to pester you with ads before every single damn episode of a show you watch).
I guess their own opinion about that show ain't too high...
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Like Little Sheldon? Because that's what they're pushing right now like mad.
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Rejoice, for they have spliced those preroll ads in to the videos themselves without changing any of the timings on videos, such as subtitles or next episode.
Political Agenda. (Score:2)
If they would stop destroying well established stories to push a political agenda maybe they would stop losing so much money.
Making programming is expensive (Score:3)
Hollywood is expensive. That's all you need to know. You go to Hollywood and see the amount of money being spent there and that's why your studio costs billions to run.
And you really can't avoid it - if you want named talent, they're going to cost you - first as a flat payment, then residuals. An action movie can cost $100M on the low end to shoot - if you want cheaper you need to switch genres to like rom-coms and such.
TV content isn't cheap to produce either - top tier TV shows often pay the talent $1M+ per episode - or more ($5M isn't unheard of). On a normal TV season with 24 episodes, that's $24-120M for ONE actor. The others will demand similar amounts, so a decent cast can probably demand $200M-1B just for the actors alone. Sure, that's why we have 10 episode series , but having a few of them and you're already in the billions in acting fees. Then you have everyone else, directors, PAs, props, special effects, etc. Add in location permitting and yeah.
You have to remember Hollywood actually imposes a lot on shooting locations, and to stay in the good graces of many locations, they pay really well. Not quite bribery, but they pay enough that it's a generally good experience so you'll let them shoot there again. I've seen them rent out a parking lot, paid employees to park elsewhere or taxi to work for the entire time (overpaid, even - if you wanted to pay for express service, they let you - again, minimize inconvenience). Then at the end, they cleaned up, and the parking lot was refreshed and repainted and everything got fixed up - left it better than they got it.
If your business needs to close a few days, they'll compensate you and let you stay open when they're not shooting so you can still service some customers. And if it's a business they can use the services of (e.g., it serves food). they'll buy your food.
If Amazon wants to save on things like this, shoot elsewhere. Bollywood is still very cheap. Otherwise, think back to the Simpsons episode where Hollywood comes to Springfield and yes, that happens a lot too.
Fun fact (Score:1)
I've watched all of Amazon's originals. Most are trash.
Thanks for trying.
Re: (Score:1)
"Odetta Watkins, the company’s head of drama series, said Citadel “needs time” to grow its audience at home."
Googled her picture and I instantly knew
"Piracy is back" Karma (Score:2)
Why? Simple. It's a worse version of Netflix (Score:2)
And that's an awfully low bar to set, but yet Amazon manages to trip across it consistently.
- The app UI is slow as shit on all but the latest Roku devices.
- Finding things your interested in on Amazon Prime Video is an exercise in futility unless you know the name of it.
- Their habit of intermingling paid content with Prime content is not user friendly. At all.
- When they do legitimately create solid content from a well-known writing team (Looking at you Paper Girls), they don't market it and cancel it pre