The most expensive shows on TV (and the even pricier ones on the way)
By Dan Selcke
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs an ungodly amount of money
On September 2, Amazon will premiere The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a TV show set during the Second Age of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings story most of us are familiar with.
The series is making waves for a lot of reasons, but the biggest is the cost. According to Variety, Amazon is spending a staggering $465 million to produce the first season of this show. (The entirety of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy cost $281 million, for reference.) That works out to be around $58.125 million per episode; the first season will have eight.
Granted, some of that money will go towards building infrastructure the show hopes to use in later seasons. But still. But STILL. $465 million on one season of TV. That is bonkers. That is nuts. That is several orders of magnitude beyond anything else on this list.
It’s the kind of budget only possible when Jeff Bezos is calling the shots, with his bottomless pits of Amazon money. I would say this is the new bar for studios to clear, but I don’t know if other studios would be able to clear it even if they wanted to. I don’t know if their accountants would let them.
It’s so much money The Rings of Power almost seems more like a comic folly than a TV show. And keep in mind, this series doesn’t really have any big stars in it, so the money is all going into the show itself. Will it pay off? What would it even look like if it did?
Part of me wonders if this budget explosion is sustainable. Stranger Things is a very popular show, but is Netflix getting the return on investment necessary to justify spending $30 million per episode? Amazon is wealthy enough to do whatever it wants, but unless The Rings of Power becomes the most popular show in history, at some point you figure investors will wonder why the company is spending such exorbitant sums, Jeff’s nerdy interests be damned.
I predict that this bubble will burst sooner or later — it depends on how hard these shows end up hitting — but until it does, we’re happy to soak in all the ambitious genre TV on offer, the good and bad.
Next. Have any of these 15 shows become “the next Game of Thrones”?. dark
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