The Rings of Power Budget per Episode is Twice Stranger Things' One
Remember how we used to be impressed by the dashing amount of money that Netflix spent on Stranger Things?
While the streaming giant is rarely open about its' spendings and even less information is given on the revenue and watching numbers we did get some insights from the article in the Wall Street Journal from April 22, 2022. According to WSJ, one episode of the Stranger Things season 4 cost Netflix $ 30 million. It is 6 times more than an episode of Game of Thrones and some 3 times more than some of Netflix's hits like Bridgerton or The Witcher.
While even these numbers were wildly discussed the stake did surprisingly work for Netflix. The platform has reported Stranger Things 4: Volume One had garnered a staggering 286.79 million hours watched over the course of its first weekend, breaking the platform's record for an English-language TV show (the overall record still belongs to Squid Game ) and has become the most discussed show of the summer.
But now we have one more show to discuss and it is twice, if not three times more expensive than Stranger Things but — guess what? — nobody wants to watch it. That leaves Reddit puzzled: how come The Rings of Power is the highest-budget TV series per episode of all time but all we want to talk about is the MCU and dragons? It looks like the whole marketing strategy for The Rings of Power is "look at us, we spent so much money on this show."
And it really was a lot. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been reported to have had a budget of nearly half a billion dollars, including the money it cost to acquire the rights from the Tolkien Estate. It is undoubtedly the most expensive TV show ever made, with almost $58 million budget per episode. What do people talk about? Was it worth it? To sum up the talks, the answer is "no".
With this amount of money going waste to on the show that turned out to be basically a fan-fiction nobody is willing to watch, one cannot help wondering what good can be done with that money. The most reasonable suggestion would be to support other Amazon Prime shows that didn't lack in creative ideas, like the Wheel of Time, which could also be a better bet for Amazon. Or, as the collective wisdom of Reddit has to say: spend more on writers. But at least in one way The Rings of Power were truly groundbreaking: it was the most expensive show ever to be ultimately labeled as the show pretty much everyone loved to hate.