Amazon announced Monday that it has acquired the television rights for “The Lord of the Rings”, the cult fantasy saga of JRR Tolkien, with the intention of making it a multi-season series.
According to the Deadline website, the e-commerce giant, who was competing with Netflix and HBO, won by putting a staggering $ 200 million on the table.
Located in Middle-earth and featuring some iconic characters from the mythical saga, the series will feature new adventures that precede “The Brotherhood of the Ring”, the first installment of the famous trilogy, said in a statement Amazon Studios, become in a few years a major player in audiovisual production.
Rights purchase agreement includes the possibility of developing another “Lord of the Rings” series, described by Sharon Tal Yguado, director of fiction series at Amazon Studios, as “a cultural phenomenon that has captivated generations of fans “.
Scriptwriting, filming and post-production are expected to add $ 100 to $ 150 million a season to the already astronomical budget of this project according to Deadline.com, but the internet giant seems ready to put the major resources to produce a series Fantastic as prestigious as HBO’s “Game of Thrones”, as Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos would have challenged him to his creative teams.
The series will be available on an unspecified date on the Amazon Prime Video Service.
“The Lord of the Rings” was voted the millennium favorite book by Amazon’s clients in 1999, and the all-time favorite novel in a 2003 BBC survey.
The film adaptation of the trilogy by Peter Jackson – with Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler and Orlando Bloom – generated nearly $ 3 billion worldwide and garnered 17 Oscars.
The director then made a “prequel” trilogy adapted from Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit”, which raised similar amounts at the box office.
