Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is betting big on “The Lord of the Rings,” possibly pouring more than $1 billion into the upcoming series. How much is this investment worth for Amazon, and what is the benefit it will gain from this? In this article, I will try to put together the available date to give a valuation of Amazon’s investment and its possible returns.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series will premiere on Friday, September 2, 2022, on Amazon Prime. The premiere will be available in 240 countries, with new episodes released weekly for a total of 8 episodes.
The series was announced back in 2017. It was supposed to be released last year, but the shooting was slowed down due to the covid-19 pandemic.
The expectations for this series are high, and Amazon declared that its Super Bowl teaser trailer broke every viewing record and became the most watched super bowl trailer, with 257 million views in the first 24 hours.
Google Trends, too, registered a peak during the last Super Bowl. It is now showing that, over the past month, the interest for “The Lord of the Rings” seems to be moving upwards once again. We can expect the interest to further increase as we approach the premiere.
Tolkien fans have waited a long time for new movies that would take them back to Middle-Earth. However, fears of another disappointment after The Hobbit trilogy are making many fans more cautious about the new series, waiting to view it before celebrating its release.
One note: Amazon is notoriously wary about giving detailed information about its investments and the breakdown of its returns. This is why, on one side, I researched as thoroughly as possible to find correct data, while on the other, I will still have to make some assumptions. I will make them as conservatively as possible, to convey a realistic idea of the deal.
At first, we had no idea how much Amazon bid to purchase the television rights. However, as some news came out, it became known that Amazon spent $250 million to buy the rights from the Tolkien Estate.
The second problem, which is still somewhat unresolved, has to do with the sources the rights give access to. At first, it was thought that Amazon only had the rights to the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings. However, as some news was released, one of the main websites of the Tolkien fandom, theonering.net, theorized that Amazon seemed to have rights to The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales, contrary to what had been previously believed. Theonering.net said that there were elements and passages that could come only from these books and not from the appendixes. The article also reported that Amazon had to work closely with the Tolkien Estate to make sure the series didn’t wander astray from the real inventions of Tolkien and that, so far, the Tolkien Estate had been very happy with Amazon Studio’s work, to the extent that it has widened the horizon of the purchased rights. Furthermore, it was reported that Amazon also acquired merchandising rights.
