Lord of the Rings TV series: Amazon head talks about their plans for the franchise
By Shawn Lealos
Amazon Studios shocked a lot of people when they paid $250 million to make a Lord of the Rings TV series for their streaming service and then pledged up to $1 billion in making the show.
However, Amazon is not going into this blindly. As we originally mentioned when the deal was struck, Amazon knows what it is doing and realizes that making a Lord of the Rings TV show will help them sell other items in all parts of the Amazon universe.
That is why their properties almost always are based on books or pop culture. Bosch is based on the Michael Connelly novels, of which there is 21 for sale on Amazon. The Man in the High Castle is based on a book by Philip K. Dick — as is an anthology series that Amazon put out concerning Dick’s various stories.
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In an interview with Deadline, Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, said her goal was to create a “pipeline” of genre material, of which Lord of the Rings is part of their future now. She said that instead of going broad like Netflix does and creating everything, they will focus simply on keeping the bar high.
When it comes to Lord of the Rings, Salke said that she has spoken to Simon Tolkien for “a couple of hours” about the TV show and Amazon TV exec Sharon Tal Yguado also spent a lot of time with the family.
While there is no big news yet, as the deal is only a month old, Selke said that there should be news in the next month when it comes to Amazon’s strategy.
She also said that they are in talks with Peter Jackson about how much — or how little — he wants to be involved in the project, but that is also not decided yet.
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Finally, there will be one big series for Lord of the Rings, rather than splitting it up into a number of smaller series. While it won’t remake the movies, there will be characters that people recognize in the TV show.