Amazon Studios Head Jennifer Salke Breaks Down the $700 Million ‘Rings of Power’ Gamble and Plan for MGM Integration
variety.comJennifer Salke entered the Second Age in London. The head of Amazon Studios spent the 72 hours leading up to the launch of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” in a whirlwind, traveling from the series’ global premiere event in London’s Leicester Square to her Manhattan apartment to watch the early returns arrive via reports from Amazon’s formidable consumer research department.
The “Rings” team was exhausted, having had no chance to recover from the grueling worldwide promotional campaign for the Amazon Prime Video series that is an enormous bet for the tech giant, being the most expensive television series ever produced.
For most of launch day, Sept. 1, Salke and key members of her executive team, many members of the large ensemble cast and executive producers J.D.
Payne, Patrick McKay and Lindsey Weber gathered together for hours in virtual “war rooms,” bone tired but energized, to wait for the world’s reaction. “There was just this adrenalized excitement that, after four and a half years, we were actually letting people see the show,” Salke says. “It really was a holding of hands across the company.” Salke also kept her eye that night on the numerous war rooms filled with technicians and engineers set up in London, New York, Seattle and sites in India to ensure that the Prime Video streaming had no performance issues as it dealt with what it hoped would be a worldwide deluge of traffic.
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