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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
Rings of Power is far from Bezos' largest expense in the venture of his dating life. It's comparatively a bargain.
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying Rings of Power is somehow related to Bezos' dating life? Can you fill this in for someone out of the loop?
To make my point clearer and plainer: Amazon Studios did not originate as a way to make a meaningful profit for Amazon, but as a way for Bezos to buy entry into Hollywood circles and increase his status. People wondering about why it does seemingly irrational things are mistaking its intention.
Do you have any evidence for this? It's an accessible claim, whereas 'someone at amazon did a ... whatever it's called, business analysis or something ... and thought it'd benefit amazon's streaming platform to have a large cultural event' is less obvious.
Inherently it's a bit gossipy, but some tea leaves:
Does Amazon Studios make a profit? This is a tricky question. If it does, it does so far behind not just AWS (the main profit driver) and online retail, but also ads. In earnings reports, it's not even broken out separately from subscription services. It's not exceptionally fast growing: compare subscription service revenues (+10% YoY) to AWS (+33% YoY) and ads (+18% YoY), though online retail is stagnant. It's also unlikely that Amazon Studios is even a primary driver of subscription revenue.
Anecdotally, I know of no one who subscribes to Amazon Prime for Amazon Studios, though I wouldn't be surprised if it did increase subscriber retention by some amount. 5%?
Also consider how Amazon is thinking about the $1B RoP:
On the other side of things, what Bezos has gotten out of it:
But obviously we're not going to see a line item on an SEC report detailing the YoY increase of Bezos getting laid.
If Amazon Studios makes a series or a movie or a mini-series and it shows on Amazon Prime is there even a way to tell if it makes a profit? A lot of people get Prime for free shipping. Even if it was all about video and other benefits where not an issue, it can be hard to determine what content is driving subscriptions. Sure Amazon knows how many people are watching each of its shows and movies on Prime. But something you decide to watch after you have Prime isn't necessarily what caused you to get Prime.
There is also the pricing issue for the show, how much Studios gets from Prime. In some companies internal production wouldn't even be a separate profit center. They would know Studios cost, but there wouldn't actually be a price they get for it unless they sell it externally. My understanding is that this is not the case with Amazon, that the different elements of the company sell their services to each other in a similar manner to selling services to an external customer. But if the execs made a strategic decision that Rings of Power was going to be a "flagship" for Prime Video they might not have shopped it around to other companies and made Prime Video outbid those companies in order to get the content so even if there is some internal price its not necessarily a real market price and could be arbitrarily set to whatever. Set it high and Prime Video doesn't do as well but Studios rakes in big bucks (even if the show doesn't do well, at least as long as Prime Video keeps paying for it).
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Amazon getting into original content shouldn't be surprising given Netflix and other streaming services have been deeply invested in it for a while, though. Comparing the current profitability of amazon studios to the profitability of much more established ventures doesn't tell us anything, and even if it never makes profit ... many business ventures do just because they fail. So, given that the move to make original content is one that amazon's competitors in streaming are also doing, the claim it's primarily motivated by bezos wanting hollywood status or impressing his girlfriend, just because it could be true ... not seeing it?
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