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Amazon CEO demands a 'Game of Thrones' style hit

golem

Member
I think with the right IP Amazon could make a play for the big leagues immediately but most of the obvious ones have already been snapped up. Alot of the good suggestions here that aren't already taken, especially with regards to scifi, would take huge budgets that I think even Bezos would balk at.

A better move would be to build up a steady string of hits so you 'prime' your existing viewership to latch on to new series and give them the word of mouth boost to reach broader audiences. That way you can budget correctly if you know your viewership will be solid from the start. The very few people I know that actually watch Man in the High Castle don't ever seem to want to talk about Bosch or other Amazon shows.

Yes GoT wasn't a juggernaut overnight, but neither was HBO. HBO built up their rep by continually putting out good product that resonated with the public like The Wire, Sopranos, Sex in the City, True Blood, etc. That pays off with GoT and allows new shows like True Detective (season 1 at least) and now Westworld to budget big name talent and production values and get off to great starts.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
The previously mentioned WOOL would be a good candidate. It has those great monday morning water cooler twists and would be easy to play up the soap opera. Plus it would be limited in budget as it mostly uses interior sets. Can't see it going more than 2-3 seasons at best though, and I wasn't a huge fan of the resolution/final book.

Peter Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy would be great, it already has more sex, drama, and soap than anything else. Great visuals but the budget would weep whenever voidhawks came around :)

Stephen Donaldson's "Thomas Covenant" series would be fantastic as well, lots of pathos. The casting of Covenant would be critical but you can play up his supporting cast to add depth and variety. Same with Dresden. That actor would be in almost every scene if you stuck close to the books, so you'd have to dive deeper into the other characters. But Dresden can be VERY R rated, so there is that.

The real problem is that streaming networks dump their stuff, so they don't have the weekly building discussion and anticipation. Very hard for them to generate that buzz unless they trickle out the shows.
 
I honestly didn't know what to expect from a thread title like that. I mean, when this guy demands "a hit"...
bezos-promo-getty.jpg

Jeff Bezos sents his regards
 
For every GoT how many Sense8 shows are out there? Throwing money into a project is just one part of a perfect storm they are attempting to re-create.

Surely The Get Down would be a better comparison, as it was Netflix' most expensive show ever and they didn't do anything beyond the initial 12 episode run?

40k is the easy pick here. Imagine if at the end of GoT a space god lands and approached Snow telling him he is one of his lost sons and he has 19 more to find scattered across the universe. You gotta tell each ones story before the real one begins.

I wondered about Warhammer, but do many good stories exist in that universe?

Do harry potter.

Warner Bros. would never let that happen. If they don't already have TV rights to the mainline books sewn up, I expect they'd buy them ahead of any other studio.

There's nothing else like Sense8, and I'm pretty sure we all know the reason why that show wasn't a hit (hint: it had nothing to do with quality).

I'm just saying "hits" have less to do with luck and more to do with money and getting the right people on board.

Why was it cancelled then? I thought S2 had a huge budget and didn't see amazing returns.
 

DietRob

i've been begging for over 5 years.
Geralt of Rivia

oh wait... after saying that I googled it and Netflix is gonna do a series.. AWESOME.
 
High profile adoptation of romance of three kingdoms or some of Jinyong's popular novel series. A billion Chinese would watch them.

China makes at least two of those every year.

Altbough I would like to see Condor Heroes trilogy made in GOT budget one day.
 

jts

...hate me...
"I demand inspiration, virality, and luck"

"paint me a new mona lisa, fools"

"also a new star wars phenomenon pls"

Just keep throwing money and be smart about it, and you'll get hits. Absolutely cannot guarantee a GoT style of success in any case, no matter how much money and talent.
 
I remember people asking what the next Lost was going to be and how they wanted a Lost like hit.

Then it was GoT.

Before that you had shows like the Sopranos.

You can't just make something a hit by copying.

I think Dune, Hyperion or even a serialized version of His Dark Materials or Chronicles of Narnia would be fantastic. They're not as gruesome or adult but they all have potential.
 

entremet

Member
I remember people asking what the next Lost was going to be and how they wanted a Lost like hit.

Then it was GoT.

Before that you had shows like the Sopranos.

You can't just make something a hit by copying.

I think Dune, Hyperion or even a serialized version of His Dark Materials or Chronicles of Narnia would be fantastic. They're not as gruesome or adult but they all have potential.
Yep.

Remind me of the Halo Killer stuff. Halo was surpassed but by something very different—COD4MW.

You can’t just copy, viewers are more sophisticated.
 
Speaking of Halo, the Halo and Showtime TV project seems to be in perpetual limbo, could Amazon swoop in and make a sprawling space opera with the budget required to pull it off?
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Yep, I recently thought about cancelling Prime, because there's currently nothing interesting and I don't order that often from them that the free shipping would be worth it..
Netflix is just that much better when it comes to television.

As someone who got Amazon Prime again briefly for a trial, I think part of Amazon's problem is all their video is smashed in with their regular storefront. Netflix is only trying to do one thing and it feels a lot more of a cohesive experience because of it. Whereas Amazon video feels like "here we threw a bunch of perks in besides free shipping so you'll renew your Prime sub."

Speaking of Halo, the Halo and Showtime TV project seems to be in perpetual limbo, could Amazon swoop in and make a sprawling space opera with the budget required to pull it off?

Could they? Of course. But sci-fi has always been a pretty uneven genre in terms of success. Everyone remembers Star Wars and Star Trek, no one remembers the many other attempts that failed pretty badly and the boom-bust cycles they've had. With effects getting so much cheaper we might see a continued resurgence of shows on the level of The Expanse, but I feel like there's always going to be a schism between the people who want the science stuff heavily foregrounded and the people who just want dramatic stories in space.
 

The Pope

Member
Should just make a dramatisation about working at Amazon. Besos sounds worse than Joffery. My cousin thought she could last at Amazon but she was wrong. Besos gives no fucks. Insane work pressure.
 

NEO0MJ

Member
I feel there's incredible potential to tap into with the Sandman series, but I can't imagine how much of a big budget you'd need for all the spacial effects.

You realise Amazon started as a little online bookstore, right? He knows something about building and managing highly successful processes. I don't much care for the guy but he's a success at what he does.

I think Hashmal meant that he looks like the sort of person who wants someone murdered when he's asking for a hit, not a successful show :p
 

kevin1025

Banned
Would love to watch a The First Law (Joe Abercrombie) TV show. Probably I'd be the only one watching it though. ;)

Yep, give me The Bloody Nine! I'd watch the hell out of it. Heck, adapt all of Abercrombie's stuff, Shattered Sea trilogy included!

Plus if they start around now, they could air the first season right around or right after the new trilogy of books hit in 2019-2020.
 
Speaking of Halo, the Halo and Showtime TV project seems to be in perpetual limbo, could Amazon swoop in and make a sprawling space opera with the budget required to pull it off?

If you're talking sprawling space operas, Iain Banks' Culture is a choice property. Lots of fun, superintelligent talking spaceships, petulant drones, and beautiful people (some of whom choose to look like a bush or a rock or something.) Enough intrigue to keep Tywin Lannister and Olenna Tyrell sweating blood. It's got great characters and themes, no living author to stick his creative oar in, and the settings will soak up as much CGI and location budget as you need to feel that you're permanently moving the bar for "epic."

Some of the main characters even visit Earth occasionally, providing ample scope for satire.
 

Randdalf

Member
I remember people asking what the next Lost was going to be and how they wanted a Lost like hit.

Then it was GoT.

Before that you had shows like the Sopranos.

You can't just make something a hit by copying.

I think Dune, Hyperion or even a serialized version of His Dark Materials or Chronicles of Narnia would be fantastic. They're not as gruesome or adult but they all have potential.

BBC are doing a His Dark Materials adaption
 
"Bring me the most profitable series to come out this century. GET ON IT."

ok bozo, brb

Honestly...this is the sleeper right here. The grit, the gore, the sex, the dark oppressive feel of the world.

With dark supernatural elements. The right team and studio would break records from adapting Berserk.
Berserk might get big but even at its best, it wouldn't get half as huge as GoT. Hell not even a third.
 

Cipherr

Member
Did it? I feel like it was a pretty big hit right away.

It had the sizeable fandom and interest that it did because of the book readers. They drove a LOT of the hype because they had read and loved several books before GoT even came on though.

I don't think its easy to replicate that sort of thing.
 
I honestly didn't know what to expect from a thread title like that. I mean, when this guy demands "a hit"...
bezos-promo-getty.jpg

This guy has like a ridiculous get away exit that cost a shit ton of money in his office on top of the windows basically being thick enough that you need a rocket launcher to break through.. He'd defs be a good GoT player considering how paranoid he is lol
 

jon bones

hot hot hanuman-on-man action
The best thing Game of Thrones did is make fantasy super mainstream. I'm excited to see how studios attempt to recapture this audience with more big-budget genre fiction shows.
 
Berserk would be the most expensive show ever if they did it live action, the amount of battles and monsters that series has is bonkers.

That said, it deserves a AAA adaption, the last anime series it had...was disappointing.
 

Geist-

Member
Why was it cancelled then? I thought S2 had a huge budget and didn't see amazing returns.

Quality-wise it was great, but the show was never going to get mass appeal with a transsexual main character (OITNB had time to build up an audience because it was relatively cheap to make), a lot of social justice commentary, and graphic sex orgies.
 

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Live action Yu Yu Hakusho starring Shia Labouf as Yusuke, Channing Tatum as Kuawabara, Jude Law as Kurama and Jarad Leto as Hiei with Schwarzenegger as Toguro and Betty White as Genkai to round out the cast. You got an instant hit Amazon.
 

avaya

Member
He should have just bought Time Warner, they were speculated to have been lining up a bid, it's why AT&T rushed to get the deal done so quickly.
 

Allforce

Member
About time someone makes a competent adaptation of that comic DMZ. The timing is perfect with the state of this goddamn country right now. The US divided after a civil war and Manhattan left as a demilitarized zone? There's plenty of content for years and years.

I've wondered why this has never been made before and the only thing I can think of is cost. If money is no option for Bezos then make it happen.
 

Limit

Member
Live action Yu Yu Hakusho starring Shia Labouf as Yusuke, Channing Tatum as Kuawabara, Jude Law as Kurama and Jarad Leto as Hiei with Schwarzenegger as Toguro and Betty White as Genkai to round out the cast. You got an instant hit Amazon.

For chapter black throw James McAvoy as Sensui and merge in unbreakable universe. That's money right there.
 
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