Not only is Amazon producing a Lord of the Rings show, but now they are planning a Conan show to add to their fantasy fare.
The last Conan show was part of the Hercules & Xena era where lots and lots of terrible knockoff low-budget adventure shows were produced (eg Beastmaster, Sinbad…).
After Schwarzeneggers “King Conan” movie withered and died in development hell and Momoas movie crashed and burned a few years ago, I’m curious to see if this will be even watchable. Recent similar attempts at Sword of Truth & Shannara don’t instill confidence.
Curious to see which announced fantasy show will reach the screen first. Kingkiller, Black Company or this!
Bezos: To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their Alexas.
This seems like a weird choice. They’re already blowing a ton of money on one fantasy franchise. You’d think they’d want to do other genres to diversify their lineup.
They must want to ensure that one fantasy series of theirs succeeds, nay, dominates in the imminent post-Game of Thrones landscape. Maybe they should throw in a Lies of Locke Lamora show just to be on the safe side.
If it’s based on the actual Howard Conan stuff it has the potential to be pretty good.
Not really that strange of a choice. You have a lot of material to work with and it’s pretty dark and gritty as well as being iconic with name recognition for most people.
The question is if they stick to the books, which would be pretty amazing, or if they go full Hollywood, in which case it will likely be a clusterfuck of failure and terrible.
Well, in assume by amazing, you mean ‘leave out at the blatant racism’. I say this as a huge fan of the stories, too. The later works got really, really bad.
We’re making cinematic television and we can tell these kinds of stories with huge budgets and scope and all that, as Game of Thrones has proven time and time again. So I brought that vision to the rights holders. They liked me. They gave me the rights to the material and then we set it up with Endeavor Content, which is WME’s production wing. I wrote a pilot for them. We sold that pilot and vision for the show to Amazon, and Amazon ordered a couple more scripts to try to get a more complete vision for the series. They will be getting those very soon and then will be able to begin making their decision as to what to do with it.
Based on that last bit, this might still die in development and never see the light of day.
HBO kept a tight reign on the budget for the first 3 or 4 years of Game of Thrones. It wasn’t until it became a cultural monstrosity that HBO basically started writing blank checks. At the recent BAFTA TV awards, one of the production heads talked about the huge difference between early season and late season GOT; things that they would previously have had to shoot in one day are now given one month.
But the thing is, Game of Thrones had to earn that blank check.
So a lot of fans expecting the same kind of spending for the next fantasy show may be in for a surprise.
