The leading online retailer in the world is looking forward to expand its wings. Yes, the Amazon founder owner Jeff Bezos has now made it clear that Amazon is joining the fray by aiming to produce as many as a dozen feature-length films every year. The Seattle based company plans to become a major Hollywood player soon.
“We look forward to expanding our production efforts into feature films,” Roy Price, vice president of Amazon Studios, said. “Our goal is to create close to 12 movies a year with production starting later this year.”
While Amazon plans to get into the production by the end of the year, it plans calls for the movies to be available for streaming on their video service within a month or two of its theatrical release, which is considerably shorter than the traditional lag time of three months or more.
With a hybrid approach to produce and distribute movies, the etailer could soon challenge the film industry’s long-standing business model.
“Amazon expects to focus on ‘indie’ movies with budgets of between $5 million and $25 million,” spokeswoman Sally Fouts said. While that might seem like loose change considering the huge production costs involved in most Hollywood blockbusters, the move will add to already hefty spending at Amazon. The announcement by the company to foray into film production has, therefore, started unnerving investors already concerned about the company’s lack of profitability.
“Such films have proved challenging even for major Hollywood studios such as Paramount and Warner Brothers, which have bowed out of the business in recent years,” said Jeff Bock, Box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations.
“It’s a tough, tough racket to play consistently,” he said, pointing to the difficulty of getting good content and the competition for quality productions at festivals like Sundance.
Amazon’s decision to move towards film production has upped the ante for the likes of Netflix which had announced its decision to produce a sequel to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in October and also signed a deal for comedian Adam Sandler to star in and produce four films to be shown exclusively on the service.
Turning the tables on their rival, Amazon said it has hired Ted Hope, a producer of independent movies including “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and Academy Award-nominated “Eat Drink Man Woman”, to take its film production plans further.