Starting tomorrow, we can watch The Rings of Powerthe most expensive series in history.
But you will need to be a subscriber to Amazon Prime Video. Like you have to subscribe to HBO Max or Crave to see The dragon house, a very modest series compared to the other, since the production budget for the first 10 episodes is barely 200 million US dollars. When you have, like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, a personal fortune of 200 billion, you don’t produce “cheap little series” like that. The first season of his latest toy, The Rings of Powercost $465 million, not including a quarter of a billion to buy the rights to Tolkien’s work.
Aficionados of the genre surely know that The dragon house is of the same flour as the The iron Throne, which is regarding two centuries earlier. As for the Bezos series, The Rings of Powerthe characters live in a time of peace in Middle-earth, a few millennia before the appearance of Frodo Baggins, the main character of the Lord of the Rings.
In either case, we are immersed in fanciful and imaginary worlds that have nothing to do with reality.
NUDITY, SEX AND VIOLENCE
But what is so attractive in this kind of series? Although fans of the Iron Throne deny it, nudity, sex and violence were the first charms of this series already 11 years old. Violence is denounced less and less on television, but it has never been so present.
The global success of the South Korean series The squid game demonstrates the irresistible appeal that violence has for most viewers. Until recent years, Quebec series were among the most peaceful and measured in the world. Little by little, Quebec broadcasters and producers have noticed that violence is “paying”, so much so that they no longer deprive themselves of it.
Is the real world, the one in which we live, you and me, so detestable that we have to escape from it as often as we can and get lost in these imaginary worlds created by millions from books by Tolkien and George RR Martin?
It is not for nothing that Internet giants like Meta (Facebook), Apple or Microsoft will spend tens of billions over the next few years to create and make explorable a new digital world that has been called “metaverse”. .
Getting lost these days requires expensive apps and headphones, but eventually we’ll get cheaper access to these unusual immersive digital environments and grandiose virtual shows. It’s a simple matter of time.
HOW MUCH LONGER?
Before we can rub shoulders in the metaverse with the elves and dwarves of rings of powerthe beautiful Princess Rhaenyra and the evil Prince Daemon Targaryen of The dragon housewe have to content ourselves with frequenting them on our television screens.
Considering the huge – almost scandalous – investments made to produce similar series, we can expect subscriptions to Prime Video, HBO and most video-on-demand platforms to cost more and more. more expensive. How much longer will these series lull us into forgetting the rising monthly cost of subscriptions to video-on-demand services?
