The Lord of the Rings television adaptation might be the most expensive ever produced.
In Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video, Morfydd Clark plays Galadriel. One of many high-budget shows in recent years, it is reportedly the most expensive television series ever produced. Prime Video/Matt Grace
The experience Markella Kavenagh had working on the Rings of Power set was unlike anything else, according to her. The Australian actor who portrays the hobbit Elanor (Nori) Brandyfoot in the television series anticipated a lot of studio work, CGI, and green screens for an adaption based on the epic mythos of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Instead, what is allegedly the most costly TV series ever produced pulls out all the stops to achieve its goals.
They essentially laid the foundations for us by building the foundation, according to Kavenagh.
CBC News reported on the extensive on-site construction carried out for the Friday premiere of the Amazon Prime Video series.
“They built all of these sets for us.
They created things as realistic as they could, and we could really just enter and respond to it.”
Massive budgets changing the landscape
That caliber of production is hardly surprising; it’s just one more high-profile series in a sea of others that are gradually but steadily altering the face of television and film.
For an estimated $250 million US, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, a well-known Tolkien admirer, had his business purchase the rights to the Lord of the Rings appendices. Tolkien put more information in the appendices at the conclusion of his novels, and as a result, Amazon does not even have the capability
to incorporate details from the main narrative of the book or its prequels, like The Hobbit.
Rings of Power may cost the studio more than $1 billion US given that the first season of a five-season run is expected to cost $465 million US (subsequent seasons, though still astronomically expensive, could require slightly reduced budgets as producers will be able to use existing construction and costumes).
Even while it would place it among the most expensive series, it is not the only one. According to Variety, throughout the course of its eight seasons from 2011 to 2019, Game of Thrones cost HBO over $100 million every season. The BBC estimates that the first two seasons of the Netflix royal drama The Crown cost about $130 million the Royal Family’s true expense to the British government.
Similar to this, the fourth season of Stranger Things on Netflix averaged a staggering $40 million per episode. According to Variety, HBO Max’s House of the Dragon, which launched just a week before Rings of Power, earned only $200 million, which is comparable, albeit somewhat lower, than the Alberta-shot series The Last of Us.
Additionally, there is Disney+’s WandaVision, Apple TV’s See, and a future Amazon production called Citadel. According to The Hollywood Reporter, that project, from the directors of Captain America and The Avengers, The Russo Brothers, has a budget that’s reportedly growing to over $200 million for just seven episodes — making it the second-most costly show ever produced.
New era for TV
The TV industry has always been enormous money, but single-season expenditures that surpass Hollywood blockbusters were not always the norm. For example, Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman both had budgets that were slightly under $200 million.
Neil Landau, a screenwriter and professor of film and television at the University of Georgia, added that in addition to the money invested in these series, other factors have changed as well, most notably how production companies and streamers view them.
The New York Times, Vulture, the Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair were among the publications that noted the rise in quality of TV series like Breaking Bad, The Wire, and Mad Men over film as early as 2010.
But that’s no longer the case; previously, they were mainly cable TV shows that stood out amid the usually close-ended series. For production companies and show writers, who are beginning to view television as a totally new genre, massive, serialized, and cinematic shows are starting to become the standard.
They identify as filmmakers, Landau remarked. “Every week, a feature film is being shot. They’re not using a formula or a template, you know. It’s incredibly cinematic television for writers.”
That, according to Landau, has resulted from viewers switching from network and cable TV to online streaming services, which don’t need commercial breaks or rigid time constraints that frequently force formulaic storytelling. Additionally, since streaming services are aware that fans are likely to stick in their ecosystem regardless of whether they enjoy a particular show, they can write more cinematic plots without the worry of channel surfers tuning out after the first few minutes of an episode.
However, the field grew congested as streaming replaced other forms of media consumption by viewers. Studios would license their content to be placed there because Netflix used to be the main choice for the majority of people looking to stream video.That’s no longer the case, according to Landau, who pointed out that companies like Disney, Apple, and HBO have all chosen to create their own platforms rather than relying on Netflix. “The platforms all have audiences. Now that there are more than 500 options, the question is, who will make the greatest noise to actually get people to pay attention?”
