Legend has it, a few years ago, Jeff Bezos demanded that his team at Amazon Studios create a fantasy epic that would put Game of Thrones to shame. What resulted was Wheel of Time – an incredibly expensive attempt to create the next global fantasy phenomenon. This article takes a look inside these efforts.
It is reported that Amazon and The Wheel of Time are spending $10 million per episode for eight episodes in total (so much for those razor thin retail margins!) These are big numbers, but just a fraction of what Bezos spent on video while CEO. In a recent book on Amazon, it is reported that Bezos spent $3.2 billion on Prime Video by 2016. By 2019, that number had more than doubled to $7 billion. Apple and Amazon have an advantage here. They can make big bets and take risk with shows, knowing that their core businesses will remain unaffected. Always generating enough free cash for the next big genre-defining bet – for example, Amazon is also spending big on a Lord of the Rings TV show in case Wheel of Time wasn’t enough.
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