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Comment by anshumankmr | Hacker News Reader

Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested.

And the "internet" really reacted negatively to the trailer as well. (I personally didn't hate the trailer myself but after having watched the original trilogy and the first Hobbit movie, I was feeling a bit underwhelmed cause it didn't do a good job selling the show to me.) So it really remains to be seen whether it will be a hit when it does to go to streaming.

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> Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested.

Probably all of the above plus it's a long term move.

Amazon needs to build up a strong catalog and marquee TV shows are long term attractions. As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s. Game of Thrones would have been the exact thing but D&D completely tore it apart in the last 2 seasons.

I don't know. 465 million seems still steep for 8 episodes TV show. I am all for it cause Disney has seemingly skimped on their CG budget for their newer shows. So more competition means more TV shows will have film quality production.

But it is a concern, if their show costs more than something like Avengers: Endgame which had some of the biggest actors in Hollywood involved in addition to the probably insane VFX budget.

Obviously COVID would have affected the budget for the show, but I have a feeling that it went way over budget than was initially intended.

Although I agree with the marquee concept. HBO had their own marquee show: Game of Thrones, though it produced a lot of quality stuff like the Pacific, Band of Brothers, Sopranos etc that can be watched for years to come. Game of Thrones on the other hand was a big disappointment for the fans and its negative reception probably made HBO wonder what they would do after it was over (hence the Targaryen origin show and the Jon Snow series are being developed... personally I'm skipping both)

Presumably some amount of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting is at play. Since New Zealand is footing a fixed percentage of the budget, it would only make sense to artificially inflate the costs.

Please don’t use links as words. Links get abbreviated on hacker news.

So “some amount of Wikipedia” doesn’t get any message across.

Last 2 seasons of GoT still hurt to think about.

It's not the ending that hurts it's how it got there. The last 2 seasons probably should have been 3 full seasons instead of the barely 1.5 we got and had a lot more build up/Dany descent into madness/Bran having some relevance that would justify his elevation to ruler, etc.

The suddenness of everything, the exposition, everything was just poorly executed. Too much money spent on CG dragons, not enough money spent on episodes telling the story.

The books can remedy my pain but have already waited so long. :(

I think the last two could have been 10 seasons and it would have been bad. The issue wasn’t cramming too much material, the issue is they didn’t have writers with ideas. They had been adapting GRRM and ran out of material to adapt and just went batty.

I think the reason it is so compressed is because they could just charge through it quickly and make it work.

D&D were also trying to wrap it up quickly so they could move on to making the Star Wars series (that they subsequently got canned from).

Spoiler! Maybe edit

Is there a need to conceal spoilers from a massively popular show that aired its final seasons 5 and 3 years ago, respectively?

It's been over for three years now, one of those years where everyone was inside for a long time, and was very hotly debated on social media. I think it meets the criteria for not needing a spoiler warning

I'll never forget the day someone on the subway shouted "I can't believe character X dies!"

idk man that ending hurt pretty bad

edit: also the complete destruction of Jamie's character out of the blue in one scene jfc

Yeah they did my boi Jamie pretty raw. :(

>As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s.

Why ? The only old TV shows I see being popular long term is era defining shows you watch for nostalgia (eg. Seinfeld, Friends). Maybe some real classics like Sopranos that everyone was watching at the time.

Shows like Mad Men ? I really don't see it. And more importantly this LOTR show - how many people are even watching Game of Thrones now and how much interest will it generate in the future ? Unless this LOTR show is somehow groundbreaking with visuals (and it's a lot harder to do now then back when they did the films because the bar was so low back then) - I doubt it's a valuable long term play.

Seinfeld Is not just watch r for nostalgia, its still in syndication, and also has a massive overseas fan base.

Mad Men is timeless in its lessons, novel in its execution, and holds a unique place in TV history. It’ll be watched for decades.

Seinfeld is the exception. Heres the top TV shows of 1993:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-rated_United_States_tele...

Seinfeld is the only one that people still watch.

All those shows are contemporary to the 90's. Seinfeld just has generic situational humor + great characters, and even Seinfeld will probably fade as its nostalgic watchers age and go away. It will just take 30-40 more years :-)

There’s a lot of landline / phone booth / message machine based jokes and story lines.

I don’t think 20 year olds will have an easy time picking up the show as they can’t relate to those problems.

I think Seinfeld is very much riding the nostalgia train now.

Mad men don’t assume any of its audience knew what the 60’s was like, so it has a chance of being more timeless.

We all used to watch TV from the 50’s and 60’s in the 80’s and 90’s. You pick up on the context as you watch. A lot of situations are universal and timeless.

In America and Europe, yes. Landlines are still being used elsewhere.

What you're saying is: we're in agreement :-)

And to the original topic, a good LotR series would be closer to "timeless".

I still enjoy a good episode with Jessica in Cabot Cove, the murder capital of the world.

Gobsmacked, How can you look at that list and say "seinfeld is the only one that people still watch"?

One....that's a subjective thing, two..several shows on that list are currently in syndication, three....several are still running.

> It’ll be watched for decades.

By a few people - likely. But enough to justify investing half a billion into show production ?

> The hit Warner Bros. sitcom from the 90s, Friends, is still a big moneymaker for the studio with average earnings that are estimated to be roughly a billion dollars per year. Keep in mind that this is a show that ended nearly 15 years ago. Beyond all imagination, this is still one of the most-watched sitcoms in 2017. I know, hard to believe.

https://reelrundown.com/tv/How-Much-Money-Does-US-Sitcom-Fri...

I specifically mentioned Friends and Seinfeld as exceptions. Mad Men is never going to have this status. Friends viewership numbers were 10x, even Sopranos had 2-3x viewership. And there will be no nostalgia factor there.

And even if it DOES become evergreen, it's like Disney kid shows - sent to live in whatever monthly app (Prime in this case) to rot and die; there's not much realized revenue from them, the way syndication has.

> defining shows you watch for nostalgia (eg. Seinfeld, Friends)

But what about new viewers? As someone who is too "young" to have seen them originally, I don't find either of those to be funny. But something much older, such as Fawlty Towers, stands the test of time.

Keep in mind that Amazon needs to get only ~0.2M incremental Amazon Prime subscribers to recoup the investment. The lifetime value (LTV) of a Prime subscriber has been estimated at ~$2,300.[a] You can play around with the figure, but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks, I wouldn't be surprised is Amazon ends up getting far more than ~0.2M new Prime subscribers because of it.

[a] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/21/whats-a-pr...

EDIT: Updated the figures to more accurate (based on LTV).

Isn't it more complicated than that? Many of those consumers already own Prime. How will this impact their desire to stay? Will people actually buy Prime for this and then keep it, or will they watch and then cancel?

Your analysis makes sense, but I was under the impression that RoP was a pure passion project from Jeff Bezos with no regard for the financials or for a return on investment.

Based on what, second or third hand sources?

Jeff Bezos isn’t spending the money, Amazon is.

I'm a fan, I've got Prime, and I'm not interested in the slightest, I'm done watching giant companies ruin good franchises and legacy characters. Would have to put a gun to my head to watch this one

In Poland Amazon Prime is only 10 usd / year. So the math is much harder outside the US.

Wow that sounds like an amazing value, even with differences in purchasing power. Is amazon's retail network decent in Poland?

> but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks

Citation needed. I'm a big fan of LOTR, but I didn't even bother with the last Hobbit movie. And I expect this series to be even worse than that.

I stopped after the first Hobbit movie and I'm very unlikely to watch this unless it gets rave reviews.

Come on, it's really unlikely this show will be worse than the Hobbit movie.

I am not so sure that your statement is obviously true. One of the issues with The Hobbit films is that they stretched one relatively short book into three movies...this time around, it looks like they're stretching some apocrypha from the appendix of a book into an 8-episode TV show. Feels like a fairly similar effort to wring blood from a stone.

Not that I am interested in defending Amazon's series, which I think will be a disaster, but I don't think the comparison with the Hobbit movies holds.

True, the material they have rights to is from the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings. The difference, though, is that in this case they are going to create a completely new story. So, they can fill as many episodes they want.

With the Hobbit, instead, they had the story already and they had to stretch it to create a trilogy.

My opinion on this matter has less to do with stretching and more to do with creating. It feels like the further we get from what the author actually wrote- in terms of dialogue, characterization, etc.- the worse the final output is. LOTR isn't just good because hobbits, it's good because Tolkien's writing is good. The Jackson trilogy was close-ish to Tolkien's writing, the Hobbit films further, and this even more so. I'm of the opinion that this was a major issue with the last few seasons of Game of Thrones as well.

Exactly this. there's nothing about an existing universe that prevents bad writing for new stories in that universe. And big studio creative talent is at a historical low right now.

I don’t get the “stretched explanation”, there was plenty of material. To me the problem was that the action sequences lacked the emotional gravitas of the LOTR trilogy. It was like watching a video game.

Consider that many fans watch things they routinely disparage online. For example, many Star Wars fans routinely disparage "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," and yet it's still one of the most-watched, highest-grossing movies in the history of cinema.

Also, keep in mind there are people who are really fanatical about LOTR. At the end of the spectrum, some of them enjoy this stuff so much that they regularly attend LOTR conventions dressed up as wizards, knights, hobbits, orcs, etc. Those people will watch the new series even if it's only to criticize all the things it got wrong!

> Consider that many fans watch things they routinely disparage online.

they might not bother to subscribe to Prime for that and instead just get a copy off the high seas

I am one of those people (roughly speaking). Do with that as you will.

Isn't the growth for Amazon Prime kind of stagnating in the US? I don't think they can get 1-2 million sign ups from the US alone.

Plus, there would be folks who would subscribe for two months that the shows runs and then they may even quit.

In India, I am paying 1000 rupees for my yearly subscription to Prime Video although the only thing I watch on it is The Boys. I don't what the numbers for Prime Video are in India, but it would earn them less as compared to someone signing up from the US or UK for sure.

>but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks, the cost is totally worth it.

There is also a big question mark on this as well.

More like ~0.2M. I updated the figures to use the LTV of a Prime customer :-)

> given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks, I wouldn't be surprised is Amazon ends up getting far more than ~0.2M new Prime subscribers because of it.

You're assuming they actually subscribe to watch it. Amazon Prime already has enough subs that it should be pretty easy for most die-hard LOTR fans without a Prime account to just watch it on a friend or family member's account. Or they could just pirate it.

Amazon Prime customers spend $1968 / year on average.

$465M / $1968 = 236,280

For perspective, Disney Plus added 7.9 million users in just the first quarter of 2022.

Those revenues still have to cover the cost of buying the things they sell to prime members. It’s not pure profit.

I pay $36/yr for Amazon prime. That's over 50x less. You'd need 13M new users who want to pay for just that, and nothing else.

You're comparing profits with revenue and not accounting for risk.

> Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch

Isn’t that why Disney acquired Star Wars and Marvel?

Imagine an Amazon theme park alongside Universal Studios and Disneyland.

Disney got Star Wars for 4B, Star Wars merch is pretty much one of the most iconic and most sought out merch out there, the movies with some exceptions have been financial hits, they have had some good video games on console/PCs and they also have some mobile games that I believe would be raking in the sweet lootcrate money, the theme park attractions no doubt attract many, the Mandalorian was a critical and commercially sucessful show, and it seems despite the dip in quality in their other live action shows, the viewership has only increased.

https://collider.com/obi-wan-kenobi-finale-audience-disney-p....

I sure hope they don't mess it up. LOTR is an amazing series, it would be a shame for it to go the way of the Star Wars prequels and company.

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