“The market is crazy, as you saw with the Knives Out deal. [Netflix paid $469 million for two sequels.],” Salke said. “This is a full season of a huge world-building show. The number is a sexy headline or a crazy headline that’s fun to click on, but [the budget] is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series.”
Salke continued, “But it is a crazy world and various people on this Zoom, mostly Bela and me, have been in bidding situations where it starts to go incredibly high. There’s a lot of wooing and we have to make decisions on where we want to stretch and where we want to draw the line. As for how many people need to watch ‘Lord of the Rings?’ A lot. (Laughs.) A giant, global audience needs to show up to it as appointment television, and we are pretty confident that that will happen.”
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To put the $465 million price tag into perspective, note that Peter Jackson spent around $280 million to make the original “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The follow-up “Hobbit” trilogy cost a reported $623 million. The final season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” cost approximately $15 million an episode, bringing the total season’s budget to an estimated $90 million for six episodes.
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