Latest news with #WheelOfTime
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Amazon has killed the wrong ludicrously expensive fantasy show
Abandon all spoke – The Wheel of Time has shuddered to a premature halt. After three seasons of sorcerous derring-do, Amazon has put the brakes on its $18 million-per-episode, Rosamund Pike-fronted adaptation of Robert Jordan's fantasy saga. The original novels run to 14 volumes. Prime Video made it through the first four and a bit. It's like pulling the plug on Lord of the Rings before second breakfast or killing off James Bond when he'd just only parked himself at the roulette table. To WoT's considerable fanbase, the cancellation is a huge injustice (an online petition is, of course, already up and running). But in one sense, Prime's instincts were absolutely correct. It's about time the streamer pulled the plug on a mega-budget fantasy series that blatantly attempts to be the new Game of Thrones and is based on a beloved source material. The only error is that it flushed the wrong franchise away. The obvious candidate for cancellation is Middle-earth prequel show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Not only because it's terrible – its mishmash of awful wigs and even worse dialogue an insult to JRR Tolkien's meticulous world-building. More than that, the series has become a dead weight around the neck of Amazon – demonstrating the folly billionaires such as company founder Jeff Bezos can wreak with an unlimited budget and the conviction fantasy fans will swallow any tosh so long as it comes with wobbly prosthetic elf ears. Bezos has been criticised for firing Katy Perry into high orbit on his Blue Origin rocket. But if anything deserves to be blasted into deep space, it's the appalling Rings Of Power – which comes with a mind-bending per-episode budget of between $60 - $100 million (depending on whether you factor in the $250 million Amazon paid at the outset for the right to make merry in Middle-earth). In the case of Wheel of Time, the sheer amount of story to get through meant there was always a danger it would be killed off early. However, while the threat of cancellation was ever-present, the decision is widely understood to be related to the departure in March of Prime studio head Jennifer Salke. She had presided over a string of disasters, including Rings of Power and dead-on-arrival espionage series Citadel (a $1 billion budget and no viewers). With a track record like that, Prime was believed to have had misgivings about putting her in charge of James Bond after acquiring creative control of 007 from Eon Productions. Even by the standards of a mega corporation such as Amazon, Wheel of Time was a vast undertaking. In 2019, the company commenced building from scratch a full-scale town on a dedicated site 25 miles outside Prague. It was to serve as a base for a production that, all going well, would run for a decade (all did not go well). Pike – who played Gandalf-esque wizard Moiraine– had moved the Central Europe with her partner and children and expected to be there for the foreseeable. As co-producer on the show, she went all in on the Wheel of Time universe, even narrating several of the tie-in audiobooks (volume one, The Eye of the World, has a run time of 32 hours). She was joined by a cast of literally hundreds. There were grand battles involving a mind-boggling 3,500 FX shots in series one alone (1,000 more than in Marvel's Endgame) and a globe-hopping schedule, that took in Morocco, Italy, South Africa and the Canary Islands. In all, nearly 1,000 people are thought to have worked on the production – comparable to a large scale Hollywood movie. It was much better than Rings of Power too. Moiraine headed a solid cast that also included Peaky Blinders actress Natasha O'Keefe as a vengeful demon. The fight scenes were inventive, spectacularly violent and visually dazzling. Crucially, everything made sense – in contrast to Rings Of Power, which implied an absurd sexual chemistry between elf Queen Galadriel and the wicked Sauron. Compared to some of Jennifer Salke's more prominent flops, Wheel of Time was by no means a calamity. Reviews for series three were positive; ratings were solid. The sub-par production values and fake-looking costumes that had hobbled season one had been put right, too. But WoT was perceived as one of Salke's projects and news that it has been cast into the void is not surprising. The oliphaunt in the room is that fantasy is no longer a voguish genre. Amazon had acquired the rights to Wheel of Time after Jeff Bezos commanded underlings to present him with a project that had the potential to become the new Game of Thrones (the studio made its bid for Lord of the Rings around the same time). Going on for a decade later, Succession and The White Lotus have put eat-the-rich style social satire at the top of the Hollywood want list (see Julianne Moore's new Netflix project, Sirens). Long-haired weirdos running around in capes babbling about the Dark One simply doesn't cut it – especially not when each episode costs the best part of $20 million. Where does that leave Rings of Power? The show has been consistently dire, featuring cheap-looking sets, cheesy dialogue and – for reasons best known to the producers – a tribe of hobbit ancestors who sounded like 'thick Irish builders' from a 1970s sitcom. Horrific on every level, its trajectory has been the opposite of that of Wheel of Time, which slowly built a loyal audience (though viewership admittedly fell off from season one to two). In the case of Rings of Power, just one-third of viewers finished the first series, while audiences fell by half in year two. Why not cancel? The depressing answer is, as part of the rights deal, Prime Video is committed to making five seasons. Which means three more years of TV torture – for them and us. In a grim snapshot of television in 2025, a well-made (and much cheaper) show such as Wheel of Time is pitched into oblivion while the atrocious RoP gets to clop off into the sunset, scorned by practically everyone except the great unblinking eye of Jeff Bezos. It is a bleak end to a cautionary tale. One that, in years to come, is likely to be seen as a warning against Hollywood hubris and the dangers of throwing too much money at a billionaire's pipe dream.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘The Wheel Of Time' Deserves Another Season, Warts And All
The Wheel Of Time I understand why detractors of Amazon's Wheel Of Time series dislike the show so immensely. It runs roughshod over the source material, making too many changes to count. But it's also done something that I think is worth mentioning: The third season, which I liked a great deal, made me decide to get back into the books by Robert Jordan. Prior to Season 3, I had only read the first two novels. It took my half a dozen tries to get through the first one, The Eye Of The World, in part because I found it so derivative of Lord Of The Rings. The second book, The Great Hunt, was better but I still wasn't sure if I wanted to invest so much time into a new fantasy series, especially since I've heard from a lot of people that it drags to a slog somewhere in the middle. But Season 3, which had now moved past where I was in the books, rekindled my interest in the series. I burned through The Dragon Reborn (though I still think perhaps it should have been called The Stone Of Tear) and have been doing the same with The Shadow Rising. And I can finally say that the series has 'clicked' for me at long last. It has carved out its own space in the epic fantasy genre. Braid-tugging aside, Jordan's writing is engaging and his characters – especially Mat and Perrin – are compelling. The lore and magic and politics of the world grow more fascinating by the page. And I may not have picked these back up at all if Season 3 hadn't convinced me that this was, in fact, something special. Of course, now that I've read as far as I have, I see all the ways the show up to this point has mangled the story. Not because it's 'woke' (aside from a few casting choices, I think they've done a great job adapting a book series that was already very diverse with lots of strong female characters) but because they've taken out huge chunks of what actually happens, fast-forwarded a ton, and placed certain scenes down in completely different spots. Some characters are wildly different in the show and others get a lot of screentime that they probably don't need yet. Some choices, like making Moiraine and the Amyrlin Seat a romantic couple, feel out of place but not a huge deal in the big scheme of things. Others, like essentially taking away Mat's gambling and resistance to being part of the 'team', or effectively cutting the Stone of Tear and the sword Callandor, are frankly bizarre. Maybe it's because I don't have a lifelong love of these books that I can accept these changes. I don't like many of them, but I can accept them for two reasons: First, the show has gotten so much better since Season 1. Strip away the source material, and you have a really good fantasy show on its own merits – unlike Rings Of Power which is bad regardless of its fidelity to Tolkien. Second, I am able to say to myself 'This is just a different version of the story.' Specifically, this is a different version because it had to be. In a perfect world, Amazon would have greenlit fifteen seasons of this show from the outset with an unlimited budget and all the runtime they needed to cover the story. In the real world, that was never going to happen even if this was a hit. Live-action fantasy is too expensive. Even the most popular and successful fantasy show of all time, Game Of Thrones, was cut short. Even if they'd been given fifteen seasons, getting the cast to stick around that long would have been a miracle. They had to truncate and condense and make changes. Yes, we can question those changes, but the reality is even in the perfect scenario, what works on the page doesn't always work onscreen. This was far from the best we could have hoped for, but by Season 3 I think it was a lot closer. The cast was warming up to their characters. The writing was more confident. The special effects and costumes had improved. All across the board, The Wheel Of Time was headed in the right direction. And so of course Amazon canceled it, just when things were getting good. Fans have started a petition to save the series. It's a nice thought, though I've seen so many of these over the years and they almost never work. Occasionally another streamer will swoop in and save a show from certain death, but saving one that costs this much seems incredibly unlikely. The Legend Of Vox Machina I'll reiterate my own hopes, which are perhaps only a little less pie-in-the-sky: Let's start making animated versions of epic fantasy series instead of focusing so much on live-action. Live-action is expensive. Casting is hard and rarely not controversial (Game Of Thrones notwithstanding). Even strong series face all sorts of obstacles with budgets and cast down the road. Animated series can avoid so many of these pitfalls. They're cheaper, you can more easily replace a voice actor, children don't age out of their roles (looking at you, Bran Stark) and you can achieve the fantasy elements much easier and more effectively. A show like The Legend Of Vox Machina handles combat, dragons, magic and other fantastical effects so much better than Wheel Of Time or any other live-action fantasy. It just works better when everything is animated. CGI doesn't eat the whole budget up. Scale is less problematic. (Obviously this is not always true, as Netflix's Arcane was a wildly expensive show that went so far overbudget it was tragically condensed into two seasons, rushed awkwardly to an unsatisfying conclusion). I wish Amazon would reconsider at the 11th hour and decide to give The Wheel of Time another lease on life. I don't think they will, but the people behind the show and in front of the camera deserve another crack at it, and so do fans. In the meantime, I have a bunch more of these books to read and that makes me happy. Read my review of Joe Abercrombie's latest fantasy novel, The Devils, right here. And let me know what you think about all of this on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
News.com.au
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Streamer suddenly axes massive show three seasons in
The Wheel of Time has taken its final spin … the series has been cancelled at Prime Video. Deadline, who broke the news, cites financial reasons for the series' cancellation in their report, though notes that the streamer's executives like the series 'creatively.' According to the outlet, Prime Video and Sony Pictures Television, who co-produce the series, will continue to support The Wheel of Time Season 's Emmys campaign. Among the stars of the Prime Video series adaptation of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time book series are Rosamund Pike (who also served as an executive producer), Daniel Henney, Josha Stradowski, Natasha O'Keeffe, Zoë Robins, Sophie Okonedo, Marcus Rutherford, Dónal Finn, Ceara Coveney, Kate Fleetwood, Ayoola Smart, Kae Alexander, Priyanka Bose, Hammed Animashaun, and more. The third and final season premiered in March, with DECIDER's Meghan O'Keefe deeming the latest instalment the show's 'most cinematic season' in her The Wheel of Time Season 3 review. She highlighted that Season 3, with its cast of 'incredible actors' and 'confidence' in its storytelling was 'incredible to behold' — at least, until the end. 'Everything is great in The Wheel of Time Season 3 up until the end,' she wrote. 'After the highs of the rest of the season, The Wheel of Time Season 3 Episode 8 feels like a slumping afterthought. The conclusions to most of the major storylines feels rushed. The show's vast scope quickly contracts. Massive changes are made from the books to streamline potential future seasons and they leave tragically bitter aftertastes.' In an interview ahead of The Wheel of Time 's Season 3 release, Pike shared that she is 'very proud' of how women can see themselves in the Aes Sedai. 'Robert Jordan wrote this fantasy series that people, namely women, who had never previously been able to read themselves into fantasy so easily, suddenly had role models everywhere in this series,' she continued. Pike acknowledged that 'Jordan wrote a very, very modern tale, which we know.' 'But I think the way the show's been cast and what we've looked for in the diversity and even, you know, on all fronts — whether it's in terms of ability or neurodiversity or race — we've really wanted to be inclusive in the Aes Sedai because power is everywhere. I think that's the message we want to set forth. That power is — beauty, yes — but also power is another thing that isn't governed by one particular look.'
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
No season 4 for Prime Video's 'Wheel of Time'
May 24 (UPI) -- Prime Video has canceled its fantasy-drama, Wheel of Time, after three seasons. The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and TV Line reported the news Friday, citing low ratings and high costs as the reasons for the decision. Season 3 wrapped up in April. The show adaptation of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's books co-starred Josha Stradowski, Daniel Henney and Sophie Okonedo. Rafe Judkins served as show-runner on the series.
The Verge
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Amazon has canceled its Wheel of Time series
After three seasons, Amazon's live-action take on Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time series is coming to an end. Though The Wheel of Time 's third season was hailed by fans as the show's strongest chapter yet, Deadline reports that Amazon has decided not to bring it back due to its relatively high production costs and flagging viewership numbers. Similar to Amazon's Rings of Power series, The Wheel of Time was clearly a play to produce another Game of Thrones -style hit. When the series first debuted in 2021, it managed to capture an impressively large audience and become one of Amazon's most-watched programs. But those numbers dwindled in subsequent seasons, leading Amazon to call it quits. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter back in April right after The Wheel of Time 's third season concluded, showrunner Rafe Judkins said that when when he and his team were first shopping the series around to studios, they ultimately chose Amazon as a production partner because it 'felt like a place where they do want to invest in shows for the long term.' 'There are not a lot of places doing that anymore,' Judkins said. 'For Wheel of Time, it's really important for us to be somewhere that does want to invest in shows for the long term and not just for the splash and leave.'
