Amazed no one else hasn't commented.....
....TV works on the basis of "....what can we plagiarise that's hot...."
Currently what's Hot is Game of Thrones......which in a TV executives unbelievable small mind and short attention span can be compressed into the single word "Fantasy".
Dragons, bad people, good people, heroes, scheming GoT has it all.
So let's take LoTR and reimagine it with a GoT perspective, that's bound to sell.
You might well laugh, but the TV industry, even in it's current 'Golden Age' (for all the dross out there there's still some pretty good shows made) would look at $500m for say a 7-8 year series as cheap, if it's Amazon or Netflix or Apple or a similar streaming service $500m could equate to a $4-46bn return in committed subscribers for just that show. Look at GoT, it had 31m average viewers during season 7, now let's just say that 15% of them subscribe to HBO because of GoT so that's 4.5m (rounded off), at $10 per month or $120 per year equates to about $550m of revenue per year (OK I accept you won't get 31m straight away, but the potential is there), plus the international rights which would certainly offset the bulk of licence and production costs for seasons 1 and 2.
None of us would want the quality to suffer, but the initial investment level is not that big if they can make it a hit.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
