A new Bloomberg report cites ‘people familiar with the matter’ as saying that Jassy has asked for a detailed budget analysis for Amazon’s big shows, six of which have seemingly underperformed in the last nine months. This comes as Amazon prepares to lay off tens of thousands of employees and jettison projects no longer deemed necessary. In the last few months, Amazon has spent $100 million each on shows such as Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral, none of which cracked the list of the 10 most watched shows in the US, according to Nielsen.
Even the mega-budget Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which reportedly cost Amazon $400 million, struggled to hold on to its audience during the course of its debut season. But the show that is attracting a significant amount of scrutiny is Citadel, which underwent a major creative overhaul after Amazon threw out a version delivered by original creator Josh Appelbaum, in favour of a new version that required at least $80 million more, from executive producers Joe and Anthony Russo. Citadel cracked Nielsen’s top 10 chart on only one occasion, when it trailed Netflix’s Barbecue Showdown, Bloomberg said.
As a part of Amazon’s big-spending new strategy overseen by Amazon Studios chief Jen Salke, the company courted major talent such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jordan Peele and Donald Glover for first-look deals, which haven’t yielded the results they’d have liked. Amazon also has a deal with Priyanka, which hasn’t amounted to much either.
Even Salke’s biggest supporters, the report says, concede that Citadel began as more of a business proposition than a creative project. The first season of Citadel was supposed to cost $20 million per episode, and run for eight episodes. Ultimately, only six were aired. To avoid some of the production hassles of the first season, Joe Russo has been appointed director for each episode of the show’s second season, but he’ll reportedly be paid $25 million for the gig.
In June, Amazon Studios’ head of drama series Odetta Watkins admitted that Citadel needs ‘time to grow’, as the US audience has become ‘jaded’. At an event, she insisted that from her perspective, the show marks a ‘victory’, because it was always intended for a global audience. Amazon designed Citadel as a global franchise. An Italian spinoff has already finished production, while and Indian spinoff, starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Varun Dhawan, is currently being shot.