Amazon Will Bring The Lord of the Rings to Television

Amazon has entered into a multi-season deal to acquire the global television rights to J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. The proposed adaptation will be produced by Amazon, with participation from Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema unit, the Tolkien estate, and Lord of the Rings publisher HarperCollins. The series will of course be set in Middle Earth, but will include new story lines that take place before The Fellowship of The Ring. The deal also includes the potential for a spinoff. Amazon has spent a king's ransom for the series, somewhere between $200 million and $250 million for the rights alone, with another $150 million per season in anticipated production costs.

PageBreaks Take: Streaming services such as Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu continue to change the rules of how television content is produced, putting even more pressure on ad-supported broadcast and cable networks to keep pace.

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