HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ vs Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power’ – Can Both Series Win? | Analysis
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Two of the most popular properties in entertainment history, both epic fantasy tales with swords, dragons and heroic blonde warriors in the lead, will go head to head as HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” debuts on Sunday only to be followed by Amazon Prime Video’s “Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power” on Friday, Sept. 2.
The two massive series, costing Amazon nearly a half billion dollars for the first season, dwarfing (no pun intended) the approximately $200 million investment by HBO, will overlap for seven weeks this fall, after many years of planning and production.
Why would HBO and Amazon compete for the same TV time frame when both blockbuster series could be small-screen champions on their own? Well, there may not be quite as much Machiavellian strategy behind the move as you might think.
“There’s not some grand ‘F— you’ plan here,” a veteran TV executive not involved in either show said of the scheduling. “It’s based on whenever the shows are going to deliver from a production standpoint, how long the marketing teams need to build up awareness properly and getting ahead of the fall broadcast season. That’s it.”
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Unlike the traditional TV season which sticks to rigid programming schedules, streaming has more leeway over when it drops new content. Prime Video saw the long Labor Day Weekend as the optimal release window with plenty of catch-up opportunity for viewers right before many kids head back to school.
Still, there has been some scheduling gamesmanship. On Tuesday, Prime Video shifted its release strategy by announcing it will open “Rings of Power” with two episodes instead of just one, as originally planned. That allows the “Lord of the Rings” spinoff to drop its season finale a week before the “GoT” prequel’s. Move-countermove.
Amazon made the unusual move to announce a premiere date for “Rings of Power” last August, more than a year before the show dropped. Claiming a debut weekend so far out in advance is a strategy normally reserved for event films. Given that the tech giant paid $250 million just to acquire the rights from the J.R.R. Tolkien estate, perhaps that’s not such a surprise.
The production budget for the first season, shot in New Zealand, climbed to an unfathomable $465 million. And a second season, to be filmed in the U.K., has already been ordered. Even Smaug would be impressed with this outlay.
But the big spend also raises the stakes for the show to succeed — with critics and audiences alike. “Amazon putting nearly a billion dollars into this means it has to be incredible,” a development executive told TheWrap. “Anything less than perfection is a failure.”
Like Amazon, HBO has a lot riding on the first spinoff from its beloved fantasy blockbuster that ran for eight Emmy-winning seasons (despite poor reception for that final season in 2019). The network spent nearly $200 million on the first season of “House of the Dragon” — and would love to turn author George R.R. Martin’s fictional universe into a multi-series franchise.
But HBO has also proven cautious, dropping more than $30 million on the pilot for another prequel spinoff starring Naomi Watts that was ultimately not picked up to series. There are at least five other series set in the “Thrones” world in various stages of development across HBO and HBO Max, though none has gotten the greenlight yet.
“Honestly, my sense is that it was an internal programming related call,” an HBO Max insider said of scheduling the show just ahead of “Rings of Power,” and that it “had nothing to do with the Prime Video timeline.” The insider added that HBO — which set the new show’s debut back in March — “usually doesn’t think much about what competitors are doing.”
Fair enough. When your brand is synonymous with high-level quality over decades, you don’t really need to concern yourself with the moves of others.
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But will airing two shows based on well-known fantasy franchises at the same time cannibalize viewership for one or even both? It may help that the two shows are targeting different demographics. Prime Video views “Rings of Power” as more family-friendly — writers Patrick McKay and JD Payne have described it as a “show for everyone” — while “House of the Dragon” is expected to continue the more R-rated storytelling of the previous “Game of Thrones” series.
And since the pandemic curtailed theatrical production, there’s been a dearth of high-profile, mega-budget movies hitting theaters this summer — the last film with a budget over $100 million to open was Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” in early July.
Both shows can help fill that void — and the direct competition may actually feed a helpful attention-grabbing narrative. “If they put them out months apart, the second show would inevitably be compared to whichever came out first,” the development executive said. “By coming out so close together, it’s easier to have their own identity.”
In marketing, more can sometimes mean more. “You can consider both of these theatrical-level quality product,” the veteran TV executive said. “The press is talking about both of them nonstop, comparing both of them and that’s just going to make the hype machine even bigger than had they released six months apart. They have the entire industry of eyeballs all to themselves and one plus one is going to equal five here.”
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