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Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by Freak_NL on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @09:12AM (#31987797)
Why strange? Others have pointed out plenty of benefits that going with good but lesser known actors brings, so why take on more risk with more famous actors? They don't need them for their brand value in this case.

Amazon would probably like to have the next Orlando Bloom, but doesn't need or want the current Orlando Bloom (or any other famous actor).

Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by Sebb767 on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @10:01AM (#31988287)
Let me formulate it like this: The most expensive series so far was The Pacific, with a budget of $22 million per episode [0]. You'd expect a high budget series to spend a lot on actors and directors - let's just go with 50%. This would put this series on a budget equivalent of $800 million to $1 billion with a "normal" cast (depending on how much you calculate as budget for lesser known actors). Given 20 episodes [1], this comes down to an equivalent of $40-50 million per episode. Even extremely high production value series like GoT were well below this number. Just going with the actual number of $23.25 million per episode already makes this one of the most expensive series of all time.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be bad, but having a lesser experienced cast burn through that much money smells like bad management and could therefore be an indicator that the series is highly over-produced with not much content to go with it. Of course, time will tell, but the lack of known-good talent in the management and the insane amount of money spent don't make me overly optimistic.

[0] https://stacker.com/stories/3159/25-most-expensive-tv-series...

[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/568297/lord-of-the-rings-season-1-...

Re:Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Ring... by tptacek on Tuesday July 05, 2022 @02:45PM (#31992120)
The Pacific was definitely not expensive because of its cast (none of the leads, Sledge, Leckie, or Basilone, were well-known). You can just watch the show and see where the money went.