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This is just a bigger version of the weird shit Amazon was already doing. A couple years back my wife and I got stoned and watched half an episode of The Pack. I've talked about our occasional love for reality TV competition shows before. If you can, watch the first episode. It is basically unwatchably bad, but holy shit the production value and cost! It's a dog competition show, and they got three helicopters, two location changes, and two sailing ships for the episode. The budget on just the first episode struck us as feeling about equivalent to a full season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of X; for comparison sake.
The beauty of reality TV is the low budget. You don't pay writers, you don't pay actors, you don't really create sets or special effects, you just film a bunch of crazy people who you can underpay because they want fame that badly. Bachelor contestants are famously unpaid, while the lead only makes about $100k, and almost all their locations and stunts are sponsored by tourism boards and whatnot; for a show that is a consistent ratings juggernaut.You don't spend tons of money on huge set pieces to sell a competition that's going to be all about A) Cute doggies doing stunts that they're already trained for B) the Best in Show type weirdoes who train them. The helicopter adds nothing!
As soon as I watched it, baked off my ass, I thought to myself: when they write the book about the rise, decline and fall of Amazon this is going to be the opening scene of the decline. This is going to be the decision they talk about as making it obvious that the company that once put old doors on sawhorses instead of buying desks had lost its way. It turns out I was wrong, Rings of Power was still coming.
Do you think these productions are some kind of tax write-off? Amazon makes so much money, Jeff can afford to play with Real Toy Rocketships, so having a couple of "we sunk hundreds of millions into 'em but they flopped worse than a very floppy thing and we lost all our investment, oops, too bad, so can we offset this against our tax bill please IRS?" wouldn't hurt them that badly?
I'm not the world's best tax lawyer, but I think that idea rarely makes as much sense in cold hard numbers as it does in theory.
And anyway, Tyson was so fucking good he could fight while partying all night right up until he couldn't. Amazon is rich enough to fund all this right up until they can't.
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