Amazon is hoping its new Lord of the Rings show will be a precious commodity in the streaming wars — but it won't come cheap.
Amazon Studios' The Lord of the Rings TV series is set to have an insanely large budget of about $465 million just for its first season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. New Zealand Minister for Economic Development and Tourism Stuart Nash revealed that price tag to Morning Report, and the Reporter confirmed it.
"This will be the largest television series ever made," Nash said.
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To put that in perspective, the Reporter notes that Game of Thrones cost about $100 million a season. The $465 million budget would also make the Lord of the Rings show's first season almost $90 million more expensive than the most expensive movie ever made, not adjusted for inflation. The series will be filming in New Zealand, and "Amazon's spending will trigger a tax rebate" of $114 million, the Reporter says.
The monumental price tag was quite surprising especially considering it had previously been reported that Amazon was expected to spend $500 million on the show across multiple seasons, rather than close to that amount just on season one. This is one of a number of upcoming shows clearly hoping to be the next Game of Thrones, but we'll have to see whether it can truly become the one streaming series to rule them all.
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