Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[Rennadrel]

And, as you said yourself, as trash as the show can be, and next to zero engagement from the fanbase, still become a success by arbitrary metrics, so there is no reason to stop doing it

The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That is kinda how I view how Amazon has been handling this show in light of it doing poorly relative to the budget that they've spent on production and licensing, and the overall viewership numbers jumping the shark rather quickly as season one went on.

So they sidelined the showrunners for season two and decided to bring in a couple of other people who are also significantly lacking in experience producing a show, thinking that it'll somehow be better. I've said it before but Prime Studios has a massive problem with nepotism from their upper management. Jennifer Salke needs to be canned because there's no way you can let literal nobodies keep producing these high budget projects and not get significant ROI from it in terms of viewers. Either that or at the very least there needs to be creative oversight over these projects from upper management to ensure the shows are successful by holding the producers accountable and not letting garbage get released to the public.

[bledgor]

The LOTR films in total, all 3, barely did the numbers of singular Marvel films. This information is on Wikipedia if you want to look that up.

I mean this is a pretty stretched logic to introduce. Sounds like a typical BS stats defense. Lets ignore things like the minimal increase of 50% in ticket prices (yes the first phase the tickets weren't 50% but only $1.50 more, but by the time of big money makers the price of tickets had gone up over 50%). Not to mention even people in the movie industry are pointing out how soulless and vanilla comic book movies are, they are literally the fast food/Mcdonalds of movies.

Also you act like Marvel series had a bunch of movies get close, it was literally only Endgame/Infinity War, a pair of films with what a 20 movie build up?

The 3 LOTR movies made ~3 billion dollars, are among the highest grossing film series EVER (with Hobbit they are 12th, without it they would be 22nd). All of phase 1 BARELY earned more money than the 3 movies dd, and if you include The Hobbit it wasn't till phase 3 that marvel beat them out in a singular series (it would have taken all of phase 1 and half of phase 2 to edge them out).

Not to mention the sheer accolades that the trilogy has received (won 17 out of 30 Academy awards), the fact it is widely considered the best fantasy series/movies, and even is in the national film registry of the Library of congress for being so significant.

Like I get you like stats, how about how many people finished the series vs started it? You know why we will never get that stat from amazon? The show lost A LOT of people before the end, because it was a piss poor adaptation with some terrible dialogue, bad pacing and story lines, basically carried by music, visuals, and one of the greatest legacies one could ever ask for topped with a larger budget in ONE SEASON than the entire original trilogy combined.

[Syegfryed]

If that were so, everyone would use these metrics and make nothing but "objectively good" things.

Spoiler: no such thing exists.

All subjective.

Thats a dumb take, because those objectively good things require, time, talent and effort, if you don't have those you can't do good things, even if you want to.

You know you have to hire good actors, but you don't, because any reasons, this will drag your work down, this is the same for the script, the direction and all, otherwise all movies would be good and therw would not be bad movies..

Even if you don't have access to ProData or Quckstats, a simple Google Trends comparison has the last 5 years LOTR the least among Marvel, Star Wars, and Harry Potter.

You want to compare a movie from 20 years ago to shit that happens recently? cause we had thestar wars sequel and fantastical beasts, lord of the rings didn't have much apart from a trilogy 10 years ago. Hell, HP have the game going on increasing people engagement, it was the most sold game a month before release in all plataforms.

And LOTR are still holding up, like you said, even with nothing going and a trash show to lower their credibility lol.

The LOTR films in total, all 3, barely did the numbers of singular Marvel films. This information is on Wikipedia if you want to look that up.

Numbers of what? oscars? money? tickets sold? what we are talking about here?

That isn't a lot. They got it for a bargain.

Well, maybe 1 billion isn't a lot for bezos, but the money comes from somewhere, and need to come back.

- - - Updated - - -

The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That is kinda how I view how Amazon has been handling this show in light of it doing poorly relative to the budget that they've spent on production and licensing, and the overall viewership numbers jumping the shark rather quickly as season one went on.

But thats the big problem, as long they make into that chart, and have "x millions of minutes watched" they think they are succeeding, so, they are fine with getting the same result, because by those metrics, the result is a success.(let alone how those "minutes watched" is a very sus metric to use)

I mean, i don't remember if wheel of time manage to go to those charts, but they are still making another season, so they reach a number of minutes to be considered a success in their metrics, and tis fine to do another, even if its trash like RoP.

So they sidelined the showrunners for season two and decided to bring in a couple of other people who are also significantly lacking in experience producing a show, thinking that it'll somehow be better. I've said it before but Prime Studios has a massive problem with nepotism from their upper management. Jennifer Salke needs to be canned because there's no way you can let literal nobodies keep producing these high budget projects and not get significant ROI from it in terms of viewers. Either that or at the very least there needs to be creative oversight over these projects from upper management to ensure the shows are successful by holding the producers accountable and not letting garbage get released to the public.

That woman is crazy in the head, that lady AXED the Conan series that was in development because "it was too manly", and fired the dudes working on it, what they did? went to HBO and made House of the dragon, one of the best shows last year. And conan show had so much potential.


I seriously don't know how those people can fail upwards, they fail and get another or even a better job to do, is nuts.

[rhorle]

Is "not as big" that they paid fucking a billion for some of the rights

They paid $250 million for the rights. I'm not sure how, after all your time and involvement in this thread, that figure is confused with $1 billion.

[rhorle]

But thats the big problem, as long they make into that chart, and have "x millions of minutes watched" they think they are succeeding, so, they are fine with getting the same result, because by those metrics, the result is a success.(let alone how those "minutes watched" is a very sus metric to use)

Why is it "sus"? You yourself admitted in another thread of watching a show you called bad two times and likely would watch it a third time. The problem here isn't that metric. Why wouldn't how much a show is watched be useful for a metric? Why shouldn't potential multiple viewings by the same people be included? Lmao.

- - - Updated - - -

I think you are combining my post with other posts here because I didn't do most of the things you said. My total argument is that them cracking the top 15 is less impressive because of how many subscribers basically get the series for free. I didn't make up any metrics or a hypothetical scenario. You're confusing me with someone else.

You are making up a hypothetical scenario. As you are implying that everyone that gets the service for free would be watching Prime Video content. Otherwise it would be impressive when Amazon finally starts placing on yearly streaming charts. As they always would have done so because of their large subscriber base, right?

[Fabinas]

So Fencers is proving worthless to engage with, so I'll ask you this question:

Let's say Apple did something similar to what Amazon did, and made Apple TV+ a free addon for anyone who buys an iPhone. Then Ted Lasso would unquestionably make it into the top 15 streaming shows, but Apple would lose revenue because they made Apple TV+ free.

Not all engagement is the same. Engagement with a free service is different from engagement with a paid one. To take it to an extreme, if all that mattered was engagement, then no one would charge a fee for anything. The argument that making Amazon Prime effectively free had no impact on how engagement should be valued is complete nonsense.

What you claim is IRRELEVANT to corporate tv/movie industry. I understand your argument, but, whatever you say here, doesn't count for them. Amazon will ALWAYS claim success on RoP, because they managed to enter the top 15.

I have nothing more to say on the matter. Anything else is your assumption. They have the numbers. Anytime you say anything about that, you lose.

- - - Updated - - -

I mean to be fair they had a massive mostly free video service with the greatest trilogy of all time and barely made top 15 while earning 0 awards. Not much of a success.

I agree with all my heart. For us, consumers, for critics, awards-wise, it was a massive FLOP. It was mostly hated for any reason you can find. Art, production, scenario, acting, add whatever you like.

BUT!!! Whatever we say here means nothing to Amazon and the movie/tv industry. The numbers from Nielsen, unfortunately, show it was the only Amazon show that broke Netflix's domination of top 15 watched shows. And that's despite Amazon producing and streaming superior shows in every facet. Boys, Reacher etc.

That top 15 spot is (and will be) what Amazon claims as "success". It will be always accepted as such in the relevant industry.

Also, hatewatching, hateposting, uploading hate videos in youtube etc, all count as "engagement" for them. If all the above are still happening, the more engagement numbers Amazon can claim.

- - - Updated - - -

I said once, RoP success is like when your mom give you money to make lemonade, but your father buys all, because no one else did, you can say it was successful because all the thing was sold. This is the kind of metric used.

Let alone that the chart show 9.4 million "minutes watched" for the season, and they said 8milions or the first episode/premiere, that means only 1m for the rest of the season, and if that is true, no matter how metric you use, this only can be seeing as a failure, thats low engagement and low numbers.

It doesn't matter for the corporate suits. They got a nice number from Nielsen, and they will always claim success from now on. As the kid will claim to its buddies that it managed to sell all lemonade and made x bucks. If it grows up, it may still show off with the story. Forever.

Every hatewatch of this on Prime gave the numbers. And Amazon can claim "engagement" for the show, even if we assume or we could magically know or prove that EVERY SINGLE person who watched it, hated it.

It's simple, yet you continue to argue with objective numbers, using abject stuff.

To them you will always look like a fool. Plus, they will be happy you actually keep talking about this trainwreck. Yes, it's that cynical.

Bad rumours or opinions still count as publicity and "success" numbers to them. Stop arguing.

[Triceron]

BUT!!! Whatever we say here means nothing to Amazon and the movie/tv industry. The numbers from Nielsen, unfortunately, show it was the only Amazon show that broke Netflix's domination of top 15 watched shows. And that's despite Amazon producing and streaming superior shows in every facet. Boys, Reacher etc.

The Boys is number 11 when RoP was 15.

[s_bushido]

It is coming, the day of the 2-3m per episode series, not yet. But it is going to happen.

I would be incredibly surprised if that ever happened. Music videos are around that length, and even then the ones that try to be "cinematic" end up being longer than the run-time of the song itself.

[Shadowferal]

The Numbers Are In And The Rings Of Power Failed at least according to that website.

Bounding into Comics reports that Amazon’s Rings of Power, the most expensive series from Amazon Studios, did not bring in enough viewers to justify the price tag.

Nielsen has been the most trusted name in television ratings for decades and the companies efforts in tracking streaming programs is also second to none. As a result, when the best tracking company in the country reports that the Rings of Power wasn’t even the most viewed original on Amazon Prime Video, it’s not good for the Tolkien adaptation. Months ago, the head of Amazon Studios talked about the records broken by the series, but going by Nielsen’s information, a different narrative for the show takes shape.

Rings of Power started out very strong with over 25 million viewers worldwide for the first episode. That’s good! By Amazon’s own admission 100 million watched the series while it was first airing! That’s good! The series is eight episodes long meaning 75 million watched the remaining 7 episodes, which equates to barely over 10 million for each of them. That’s not good!

Now those numbers are going by what Amazon has publicly shared, which are vastly different from Nielsen’s report for 2022. In the Nielsen report, Rings of Power is the 15th most watched original series, losing out to Netflix’s heavy hitters Wednesday, Great British Baking Show, Umbrella Academy, and Inventing Anna. Worse for the show that cost millions just to acquire the rights from Tolkien’s estate, is that The Boys did better numbers.

Using Amazon’s numbers mean that the Rings of Power was a disappointment, going by the Nielsen numbers it also underperformed, which means this would be a great time to try and use social media and figure out how the public felt about the show. On every platform, from Facebook to Tumblr, Twitter to Mastodon, fans expressed a mostly negative sentiment about the series. To Amazon’s credit, the Head of Global Television Vernon Sanders did publicly say that “some people just aren’t on board.”

Rings of Power is returning for a second season sometime in 2024. Hopefully in the meantime the studio is retooling and revising the scripts based off of fan feedback. While it’s never good to fully listen to the fans, making small adjustments here and there can dramatically alter how a show is perceived by the public. When the most expensive show in a company’s history, based off of a franchise that has stood the test of time for nearly 100 years, is losing out to Gilmore Girls and Cobra Kai, it’s time to try something different.

[s_bushido]

Bounding into Comics reports

rofl... Thanks for instantly reminding me why I dipped from this shitshow of a thread months ago.

[Shadowferal]

I think the reality check is that Amazon is considering changing the showrunners...assuming they haven't already, or at least dilute their idiocy. The show just isn't the big hit Bezos wants...his "Game of Thrones" isn't even close to its successor "House of the Dragon."

[Fabinas]

The Boys is number 11 when RoP was 15.

True. I stand corrected.

Nielsen Top Streaming Originals in 2022


However, The Boys achieved that with 24 episodes, while RoP had just 8. Dunno how important is that for the industry, but to my simple mind, The Boys managed only 1,2 million extra minutes viewed with triple the episodes, making it less successful (in my honest and definitely not professional opinion) than RoP. If @Fencers can chip in in my amateur interpretation of the table data, i would appreciate it.

Again, for anyone who wishes to reply here.

I am not defending the show. I hated it. And i consider it a failed TV show, because, despite the well known and historic IP, the money thrown to get the rights and spent on the production, it had a bad and amateurish story and scenario, mediocre and bad acting (in general) and the deviations from the basic Middle History facts, as given by Tolkien, were nonsensical.

Thing is, i do understand there's a discrepancy between what the TV/Movie industry regards as "success", compared to what audiences believes it is. Most of the times, a TV product has enough quality, so the corporate tv metrics and the audience perception/acceptance coincide (see Wednesday on the above table: Same episodes, almost double minutes viewed, compared to RoP).

In case of RoP, those do not. The general feeling is that the show flopped hard. The objective industry metrics, though, are enough to consider it as a "success".

This is not a point of discussion. Whenever Amazon claims S1 of RoP was successful, they have a proof. We cannot dispute that, with any argument. We can only compare it with other shows on the above table. Not that this will stop Amazon considering it a success. We can only ascertain our opinion of the show with such comparisons.

Even the hatewatching, the dismissive articles, the critic reviews with low scores, all are considered "engagement" which added to the corporate interpretation of the show's "success". Even our desire of an informed opinion on the show and any subsequent publication of this opinion or consumption of other opinionated content, that is being measured by objective industry standards has helped RoP to achieve industry "success".

We are partly responsible for this success, along with anyone else who hated it.

- - - Updated - - -

I would be incredibly surprised if that ever happened. Music videos are around that length, and even then the ones that try to be "cinematic" end up being longer than the run-time of the song itself.

That will happen probably after many years, when the next generations are accustomed to such short, instant gratification content. Kids these days consume short Tik-Tok videos like candies.

If this keeps up, in X (dunno how many are x) years, this will probably happen.

[Rennadrel]

I seriously don't know how those people can fail upwards, they fail and get another or even a better job to do, is nuts.

They can fail upwards because ESG and DEI policies give them ample opportunities to do so. Unfortunately the investors and shareholders for a lot of these companies that have been struggling with their shows and films recently have started to come knocking asking why they aren't getting enough of a return. I'd love to know how much money Prime Studios sinks into their exclusive productions and what their viewership numbers are like in contrast to those show budgets, because if I had to guess, it's been a losing venture for them.

[Fencers]

I think you are combining my post with other posts here

Maybe! I don't know who is who honestly. Every single person on this forum, Reddit, or Twitter, et cetera is essentially a robot to me. I apologize if I mistook your commentary for another person.

My total argument is that them cracking the top 15 is less impressive because of how many subscribers basically get the series for free.

As I said, that is personal to you. You are not personally impressed. As a property, it is impressive Amazon got the Boys and Rings of Power charted where others couldn't get anything at all. Even with major properties such as Star Wars or Marvel.

The industry considers it impressive. Nobody cares how Amazon did it. They just care the minutes are there.

I didn't make up any metrics or a hypothetical scenario. You're confusing me with someone else.

Again, I apologize for the mistake on my part.

- - - Updated - - -

Thats a dumb take, because those objectively good things require, time, talent and effort, if you don't have those you can't do good things, even if you want to.

You know you have to hire good actors, but you don't, because any reasons, this will drag your work down, this is the same for the script, the direction and all, otherwise all movies would be good and therw would not be bad movies..

Do you know how actors are hired for roles? How production is contracted?

If there was a way to make objectively good anything in the entertainment business, they would do it 100% of the time. Focus testing wouldn't exist. CinemaScore would be out of business.

No such thing exists my dude.

You want to compare a movie from 20 years ago to shit that happens recently?

I was comparing the properties. As a property, Lord of the Rings is not as valuable as the other brands mentioned. Even if it were, equally as popular, it is still remarkable they charted where others did not.

Numbers of what?

The unadjusted domestic box office is the only industry standard for film success.

- - - Updated - - -

I would be incredibly surprised if that ever happened. Music videos are around that length, and even then the ones that try to be "cinematic" end up being longer than the run-time of the song itself.

It will eventually. We might see hour-long shows broken into 2-3 minute videos that can be posted or inserted on various platforms as an intermediary. At some point, that practice will just be producing 30 mins of content edited into 1-minute chapters.

The algorithms and metrics indicate this is a more palatable method of content delivery to an increasing number of people.

What content owners want to do is have these videos everywhere.

Once, years ago when I was still new, I got into heat with my boss and someone at Fox (before the buyout) because I didn't account for the views on an embedded video on the Yahoo News front page in a dossier portfolio for Fox. Which was like an extra half a million views for a trailer Fox wanted the engagement numbers reported. The video was 20 seconds of a full trailer that was only about 2-3 minutes.

It was pretty embarrassing for me but also enlightening as to what they care about at the end of the day. They are asking for it and will get it at some point.

- - - Updated - - -

However, The Boys achieved that with 24 episodes, while RoP had just 8. Dunno how important is that for the industry, but to my simple mind, The Boys managed only 1,2 million extra minutes viewed with triple the episodes, making it less successful (in my honest and definitely not professional opinion) than RoP. If @Fencers can chip in in my amateur interpretation of the table data, i would appreciate it.

They only care about minutes and/or the engagement points for a property.

If a video plays in the background of a webpage for 100,000 people loading that page, and plays for 3 seconds Amazon would say "Huzzah! 4.3k minutes of content delivery!"

If even half those people click on the video; someone is going to get a new turtle shell tabletop or gold toilet at the end of the year. Amazon has 20 second clips from the Boys that do like 500k+ clicks and views. The only ROP clip I saw was like 80k views in one day. Amazon very likely released more than one clip for RoP over the course of the series. It all adds up.

As I said before if all the minutes came in the first episodes of RoP they would not care. It's just minutes.

It works the opposite way too. One of the reasons Stranger Things, Friends, The Office, Kardashians, Shahs of Sunset, The Bachelor, Masked Singer, and so on are such massive shows is that there are a million episodes.

Before streaming, TV shows worked like this too. Series used to have their cast party at 100 or 120 episodes (depending) because that was the minimum needed to reach syndication eligibility. Everything after was just gravy and talent increases.

Quality is not a factor at all. Well, unless you're a premium brand. That is to say, a brand is about delivering premium content as part of the business model; HBO, for example.

[Fabinas]

I'd say its already a thing, tbh. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, even Netflix has a "Quick Laughs" tab in the app with short clips from their shows now. Twitter is also sort of a hotbed of shorter clips from longer content. We could even go back to Vine 7/8 years ago. Anything that is quick, and easy for people to share with friends for consumption, younger folks are all over it.

I know it's a thing already. It just hasn't been the mainstream media format yet. But the younger audience is being trained for it.

- - - Updated - - -

This is nonsense. You're saying that the subscription model is irrelevant when discussing engagement. Again - if this were true, then every single company would just put out content for free.

I am not saying anything. You are.

Stop making a fool of yourself.

[Fabinas]

Which is fascinatingly myopic - the whole question is whether Amazon can eventually turn Prime into a profit center. It's certainly losing money right now in order to build up business. A big spend on LOTR that you give away for free was always guaranteed to bring in a bunch of eyeballs, so on that level, them producing decent but not great numbers is a "meh" result.

When you say "nobody cares how amazon did it" - I guarantee you that the people on the financial side do, because they're all pointing out that Amazon did it by losing money. It's much easier to get high engagement numbers if you are willing to lose money. The game is basically rigged in Amazon's favor as long as they are committed to losing money on streaming.

See, that's what i mean. Maybe they are meant to lose money. Maybe because tax, or re-investing profits of Prime membership to something else to keep the ball rolling or because of a long term investing scheme to become a tv industry standard. I dunno. I am making things up, just to show that YOU ARE TOO.

They only know. So, stop pretending your simple logic understands all better than them.

- - - Updated - - -

Ah - out of arguments so you're reduced to the ad hominems, I see.

I am not the one who said "that the subscription model is irrelevant when discussing engagement." You did.

And you're making a fool of yourself, because you think you know better. Where as, i don't. I accept that the industry views things in a different way than the audience.

But keep on thinking you know better. You're just a poster here denying what is TRUTH for them.

- - - Updated - - -

They only care about minutes and/or the engagement points for a property.

If a video plays in the background of a webpage for 100,000 people loading that page, and plays for 3 seconds Amazon would say "Huzzah! 4.3k minutes of content delivery!"

If even half those people click on the video; someone is going to get a new turtle shell tabletop or gold toilet at the end of the year. Amazon has 20 second clips from the Boys that do like 500k+ clicks and views. The only ROP clip I saw was like 80k views in one day. Amazon very likely released more than one clip for RoP over the course of the series. It all adds up.

As I said before if all the minutes came in the first episodes of RoP they would not care. It's just minutes.

It works the opposite way too. One of the reasons Stranger Things, Friends, The Office, Kardashians, Shahs of Sunset, The Bachelor, Masked Singer, and so on are such massive shows is that there are a million episodes.

Before streaming, TV shows worked like this too. Series used to have their cast party at 100 or 120 episodes (depending) because that was the minimum needed to reach syndication eligibility. Everything after was just gravy and talent increases.

Quality is not a factor at all. Well, unless you're a premium brand. That is to say, a brand is about delivering premium content as part of the business model; HBO, for example.

Thanks for clearing this up for me. I appreciate your feedback here.

[Fabinas]

So because they said it, it must be true? Like, say, this? Your argument is hilarious.

It's the last post, because you're definitely a bad faith poster, full of strawmans, goalpost moving and distorting other people's words, who can't accept they may lose an argument in the internet.

It's THEIR truth. THEY ACCEPT IT. It doesn't matter to them what I, you or anybody else says, claims, argues, believes. They measure success by minutes viewed.

The end.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I think the reality check is that Amazon is considering changing the showrunners...assuming they haven't already, or at least dilute their idiocy. The show just isn't the big hit Bezos wants...his "Game of Thrones" isn't even close to its successor "House of the Dragon."

You do know that house of dragon isn’t on the top 15 list right? How could RoP not be close to it when it apperntly did better then it according to Nielsen.

[s_bushido]

It will eventually. We might see hour-long shows broken into 2-3 minute videos that can be posted or inserted on various platforms as an intermediary. At some point, that practice will just be producing 30 mins of content edited into 1-minute chapters.

The algorithms and metrics indicate this is a more palatable method of content delivery to an increasing number of people.

I'll believe it when I see it. What robots say people will click on (or simply not bother to turn off when it autoplays) when browsing video sites, and what people actually want out of their scripted high-production-value content don't strike me as even remotely the same thing...

Let's not forget how spectacularly Quibi failed during a time when streaming services were raking in the money hand over fist.

[Fabinas]

You do know that house of dragon isn’t on the top 15 list right? How could RoP not be close to it when it apperntly did better then it according to Nielsen.

I thought that HoD was a far better series than RoP.

But, for the industry, RoP is more successful than HoD.

As a viewer, i disagree. Because i measure success by other standards. Story, scenario, acting, production etc. But the industry just counts beans. I mean minutes viewed.