Rings of Power Worst Enemy? Ridiculous Amount of Money They Spent On It
Generally speaking, the more funding a film or a TV series gets, the better. But this is not an ironclad rule.
The history is littered with expensive blockbusters, which bombed, not in the least because their makers thought that lots of money for production can buy them a good story – just in the last few years we've seen multiple expensive films, like Wonder Woman 1984 and Suicide Squad (2021), fail.
Or, turning from theatres to home screens, let's look at The Lords of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
It is widely known as the most expensive TV series ever, with per-episode budget almost twice that of its closest competitors in terms of funding (see). But all these money don't seem to have helped.
Why?
First of all, there is a strong suspicion that the massive expense resulted from mismanagement. There are rumors that the whole first season of The Rings of Power was supposed to cost roughly $100-150 million, instead of ending up around $465 million (which is more than the cost of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy in its entirety, after adjusting for inflation, and also far more than it did cost per hour).
Costs ballooned during the filming, because the process was organized poorly, and the production team lacked discipline, literally throwing money at problems, instead of trying to seek creative solutions.
And that ended up detrimental not only to Amazon's pockets, but also to quality of their work.
When you know that you can do whatever, and the studio will give you enough money even if your solutions are wasteful, only the most disciplined directors, with strong artistic visions, would be able to still work at their best.
The Rings of Power's showrunners clearly weren't among such, because even with all these money their product looks strangely cheap at times, despite borrowing so much in terms of visual design from the above-mentioned Peter Jackson's movies.
Just take a look at, for example, the battle scenes, which not only never involve more than a few dozen of men, but also fail to employ any of the cinematic tricks, which can make a few dozen stuntmen and extras appear to be a part of a massive force.
So, not only a shower of money was not able to fix such flaws of The Rings of Power, as plot holes and poorly written dialogue, it is possible that it in fact aggravated some the show's problems.