New Amazon series is the most expensive show in the history of television
Topics: Film and TV, Lord of the Rings
Anish Vij
Featured Image Credit: Amazon Prime
Topics: Film and TV, Lord of the Rings
A new Amazon series happens to be the most expensive show in the history of TV.
To put things into perspective, Stranger Things cost a whopping 30 million dollars per episode and was previously known to be the most expensive show ever.
However, the new Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has smashed Stranger Things out of the water.
The new show will come out 20 years after the last film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and is set to take fans back into Middle Earth to watch a story set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
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It seems that setting the film back thousands of years has set the studio back even further.
The Wall Street Journal has revealed that the new show 'comes to roughly $715 million, or about 5,143,885 annual Prime subscriptions — 0.15 percent of Amazon’s 2021 revenues and approximately one-fifth what New Zealand, where the series was filmed, allocated for its defense budget this year'.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Patrick McKay said the creators were 'not interested' in doing a show 'about the younger version of the same world you knew'.
"We wanted to go way, way, way back and find a story that could exist on its own two feet," he explained.
"This was one that we felt hadn't been told on the level and the scale and with the depth that we felt it deserved."
The official synopsis reads: "Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth's history.
"This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness.
"Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth.
"From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone."
The first instalments will arrive on 1 or 2 September, depending on local time zones, before the rest of the series is released in a weekly format.
The finale of the eight-episode first season will arrive on 14 October.
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