Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show to be ‘most expensive TV series ever’ at $1BILLION with one iconic cast member tipped to return
Amazon is set to drop a ridiculous amount on its TV adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which it views as the next Game of Thrones
AMAZON's The Lord of the Rings TV adaptation will be the most expensive show ever made, coming in at over $1 billion for five seasons.
To put that in perspective, Amazon is splurging streaming rival Apple's entire yearly programming on one series.
The online retail giant pipped Netflix to a $250 million rights deal to bring The Lord of the Rings to its Amazon Prime Video service, which is available to Amazon Prime subscribers on smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.
There's still no word on when the show will air, but the terms of the pact dictate that Amazon must kickstart filming within two years.
And after factoring in casting, producers and visual effects (none of which has been cemented yet), the series' budget could balloon to well over a billion bucks, according to .
What we do know is that Amazon is chasing Peter Jackson, director of the original The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, for an exec-producer role.
And late last year, Ian McKellen suggested that he'd be up for reprising his iconic Gandalf role in the new show.
The original three films raked in $5.85billion at the worldwide box office between 2001 and 2003.
Despite releasing a slew of original programmes, Amazon is still trailing Netflix in the streaming race.
Its rival recently cranked up its annual budget for original shows to a whopping .
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Amazon boss Jeff Bezos' solution was to find the next Game of Thrones, which led his execs to hurriedly secure The Lord of the Rings deal.
But the company could soon face even more competition from the likes of Apple (which has 12 shows in production).
Meanwhile Disney is also working on its own video platform, packed with its unstoppable Marvel and Star Wars output.
Do you want the original cast back for Amazon's LOTR show? Let us know in the comments.
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