Amazon Studios Grows Up With Some Tolkien Magic
CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Cynthia Littleton
Looking back over a decade of disruption in entertainment, there’s a case to be made that Amazon has been the biggest change agent among the tech giants that have barreled into Hollywood.
Netflix was born as a content distributor. Youtube and Facebook are intent on selling eyeballs to advertisers. Apple made its first big move into content more than 30 years ago with Pixar.
But Amazon wasn’t a given, especially considering how costly and complex producing original content is. The e-commerce titan’s efforts have reached new heights over the past four and a half years with the dawn of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” steered by our cover subject, Jennifer Salke, who has led Amazon Studios since early 2018.
From the start of Amazon’s original content efforts in 2013 (remember “Alpha House” and “Betas”?), the Seattle-based colossus brought a different business mindset to building a programming platform. As Salke explains in our cover story, Amazon Studios’ North Star mandate is to keep Amazon Prime users engaged with the platform and happy with their annual membership.
This made Amazon the first major content player to use video to sell products directly to consumers via the same one-click-away platform that serves up the video. It’s as if Macy’s carved a giant video screen into the facade of its Herald Square citadel.
Ramin Setoodeh
As Salke entered the Amazon arena nearly five years ago, she inherited what seemed like an impossible quest to deliver a new iteration of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved “LOTR” franchise. Just before Salke’s arrival, the company earmarked a jaw-dropping $250 million and a five-season production commitment to secure rights to revisit Middle-earth on TV.
Salke’s main job was assembling the right creative team to execute the show. The pressure only increased when an obscure New Zealand regulatory filing disclosed that Amazon had budgeted nearly $450 million for the series. A good deal of those startup costs will be amortized significantly over five anticipated seasons of “Rings of Power.” Still, it’s a big number that has hung over the series.
There are so many ways “Rings of Power” could have been a disaster. By the measure of worldwide fan reaction and Nielsen streaming charts, “Rings of Power” avoided the worst problems that often bog down big-budget productions.
With the show’s Season 1 finale looming, Variety will fete Salke and Amazon Studios at Mipcom on Oct. 18 with the Variety Vanguard Award recognizing contributions to the global television industry. As a leader who paid her dues at 20th Century Fox TV and NBC Entertainment, Salke has earned a moment to take a round of applause from her peers — before Team “Rings” goes right back to work on Season 2.