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15 reasons Amazon’s Lord of the Rings will be the next Game of Thrones

By Corey Smith

LOS ANGELES - DECEMBER 3: Actors (from left to right) Bernard Hill, John Rhys-Davies and Viggo Mortensen pose at the premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" held on December 3, 2003 at the Village Theater, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES - DECEMBER 3: Actors (from left to right) Bernard Hill, John Rhys-Davies and Viggo Mortensen pose at the premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" held on December 3, 2003 at the Village Theater, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images) /
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LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 06: Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Jeff Bezos (L) and MacKenzie Bezos attend the 7th Annual Sean Penn & Friends HAITI RISING Gala benefiting J/P Haitian Relief Organization on January 6, 2018 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for for J/P HRO Gala) /

3. With Amazon’s cash reserves, the show will have all the support it needs

Amazon recently hit a market value of over $800 billion, second to only Apple. And while HBO has hardly skimped on Game of Thrones, with reported budgets ranging between $10 and $15 million per episode in the latter years, they simply cannot match Amazon’s cash reserves.

Reports have pegged Amazon’s budget for the first two seasons of its Lord of the Rings series at $250 million (after paying a $250 million dollar fee to the Tolkien estate just for the rights). Depending on the number of episodes, that could be a heck of a lot of money per episode (For reference, The Two Towers had a reported budget of $94 million). What does that mean for the show?

On a series that could potentially feature everything from dragons to orcs to wizards, the budget is everything. As wonderful as Game of Thrones is, budget limitations have occasionally forced the show’s hand — the showrunners had to cut around a crucial battle scene featuring Tyrion Lannister in season 1, and fans are still wondering why Ghost the direwolf wasn’t in season 7. Amazon’s mountains of money can give its Lord of the Rings series everything it needs to be successful.

The setting will play into this, too, as not all eras of Tolkien’s Middle-earth as CGI-intensive as others, but with a sizable budget, producers should be able to bring anything they want to the small screen. And we should rejoice for that.

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