This reminds me of something I read recently.
> ..Tolkien's vision of the greatest evil in the universe was something he referred to as "The Machine", which was his way of talking about accelerated industrialism and mass surveillance.
> He wrote multiple books where the main villains were a dragon who sits on a huge pile of treasure that he never intends to use but incinerates anyone who comes near it; a man in a giant tower who's wrecking the environment with his factories; and an evil being who uses what's essentially a listening device to control the citizens of Middle Earth.
> And now Amazon is making a Tolkien show.
They aren’t going to hide the fact that the show sucks and they certainly just made that much harder by doing this.
In order for them to actually maintain their power this show would need to somehow help them create a moat (it doesn’t) or just make money on its own by driving subscriptions.
As far as abuses of power go, this is absolutely not one of them.
The issue is that this was a high dollar show and it likely had to have a lot of sign off. Unfortunately, great art and vast pre-approval don’t tend to go hand in hand.
I’m afraid we’re turning a corner in our golden age of television into a dark world of corporate overreach.
That was included in one of the paperbacks published by Christopher Tolkien as “Unfinished Tales.”
Time will tell, but I am sensing a major fiasco for Amazon studios
Xcloud and GeForce Now would like to a word with you. Does anyone actually use Luna?
Amazon is going full Sauron here. They're a multi-industry-spanning conglomerate that preferentially ranks its own show and discards negative reviews, while leaving House of the Dragon and competitors out in the cold.
They have whole other business units to recoup the costs. This doesn't even matter to them other than as a means to grow even bigger and capture/kill more industries. Talk about power.
Why are our legislators asleep at the wheel? We need to give smaller companies and startups a way to fight this. It's madness that Amazon can be bigger than Walmart, have its own shipping fleet, serve the whole Internet, run homes autonomously, own the e-reader/book market, own game streaming, and now apparently throw Hollywood around and make their productions look cheap.