For comparison’s sake, Game of Thrones is also enormously expensive in its saga storytelling, but it took a few years for Game of Thrones to really earn the incredible budgets.
The good news is that the books and especially the movies courtesy of Peter Jackson could mean that any Lord of the Rings series has a built-in audience.
For Amazon’s sake, we have to hope that the investment pays off.
That’s quite a lot of money for a TV show, especially one just starting out.