Amazon Signed a Gargantuan Deal to Bring "Lord of the Rings" Back to Life

Amazon Studios has apparently signed a gargantuan deal and bagged the international Television rights to launch J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy series "The Lord of the Rings" TV show.

Amazon is also said to have made a multi-season commitment with an option for a potential spinoff for this fantasy series in order to give the die-hard fans of this epic series a memorable and binge-worthy experience. This classic Middle Earth Mythology will be the first-ever-multi-season TV show for Amazon and will be based on Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring".

"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy became the most nominated film series in Academy Award history with thirty nominations, surpassing both the "Godfather" trilogy (twenty-eight) and the "Star Wars" franchise (twenty-one).

When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, announced a few months ago, that they are going to pay more attention to the movie and TV show business, no one would have thought that they would be signing a deal as big as this one. This binge-worthy Lord of the Rings TV series will definitely be on par with HBO’s "Game of Thrones".

The word is that this deal is approximately worth $250 million dollars. This does not even include the production cost, which could be as much as $150 million per season. So Amazon Studios would pretty much end up spending at least half a billion dollars even before the LotR fans get to watch the first episode of this epic TV series. This could possibly become the most expensive TV series and could even outdo the money spent on HBO’s Famous "Game of the Thrones" series. The reason this deal doesn’t really sound that insane and does seem to have good scope in the TV landscape is that the book and the movies were a huge commercial hit.

"The Lord of the Rings", a sequel to the "Hobbit", is a best-selling book written by J.R.R. Tolkien. When Tolkien published "The Fellowship of the Rings", he was already working on the Middle-Earth lore for almost 40 years. The three film adaptations that were produced later in 2001 by Peter Jackson, which is based on the books written by Tolkien, grossed over $3 billion worldwide and became a global phenomenon that captured everyone’s attention. "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy was a huge hit and won seventeen Oscars and was nominated for thirty Academy Awards and "The Lord of the Ring’s" third installment "The Return of the King" alone won 11 Oscars including Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.

One hundred thousand people lined the streets of Wellington for the world premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. That's roughly a quarter of the city's population.

Amazon with its long-standing commitment to literature will be working with Tolkien estate and Trust, Harper Collins and Newline Cinema, a division of Warner Bros., on this exhilarating collaboration and will strive to bring exceptional content to the big screen and deliver a thrilling and binge-worthy series to the LotR lovers.

Jeff Bezos is the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com and owner of "The Washington Post". His successful business ventures have made him one of the richest people in the world.

This definitely seems like Amazon’s attempt to cut to the front of the cultural conversation. As of now, there is no word about the concept or even the cast for this series but it is evident that the expectations for this TV show will be very high. And since Amazon has put in an insane amount of money and also a huge risk, let’s hope that when this TV series premiere on Amazon Prime, it lives up to this big buildup and turns out to be the next Game of the Thrones for all its millions of LotR die-hard fans.