Many current and former Amazon executives, showrunners, and agents say Amazon Studios is confusing and frustrating; one showrunner says Studios has “no vision”
Despite ambitious bets like ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ and the upcoming ‘Citadel,’ insiders complain that there's still …
The criticism also fits a broader pattern in which Amazon’s corporate structure has been portrayed as poorly suited to creative work, including similar complaints around its game-development efforts. For showrunners and agents, a studio’s clarity of mandate is part of the practical calculation of where to place projects.
First-order effects
Current and prospective creative partners face greater uncertainty over decision-making, priorities, and accountability at Amazon Studios, potentially making projects harder to develop and execute.
Amazon Studios’ leadership has an immediate relationship-management problem: repeated accounts of confusion can weaken trust with the showrunners and agents it relies on to source and run programming.
Second-order effects
Rival studios and streamers can use a clearer development and greenlight process as a recruiting advantage when competing for creators and agency-packaged projects.
Agents may demand clearer commitments, escalation paths, or deal protections before steering clients toward Amazon, adding friction to the studio’s content pipeline.
Third-order effects
If the pattern persists, large technology-backed entertainment units may find that capital and distribution alone do not offset the need for a coherent creative mandate and durable creator relationships.
The episode reinforces a shift toward studios competing not only for shows, but for confidence in their internal decision systems—an advantage that can compound in access to talent and projects.
The trend: Streaming-era studios are increasingly being judged on organizational clarity and creator trust, not just their ability to finance ambitious programming.
Read this one from me. Talked to so many sources for this one. They told me about the frustration and confusion of working with Amazon. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ...
So to be clear: someone whose job was to help get a show higher viewership relayed an uncomfortable but data-born fact. This was not listened to & the entire system was dropped. Then the show bombed. And the lesson is...Amazon is not doing enough of that? https://www.hollywoodrep…
this bit about why A League of Their Own was cancelled and how it reflects the dangers of relying on data without proper context, is a perfect encapsulation of the issue with all of entertainment and tech right now. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I'm getting flashbacks to every manager who's ever told me “We'd love to do more women's sports coverage but the metrics don't support it.” https://twitter.com/...
Amazon's The Rings of Power series only had a 37% domestic completion rate! They spent over a billion on that show! It's Lord of the Rings! More generally, the streaming economy's numbers do not make sense. It simply doesn't work on any level. https://twitter.com/...
So many interesting tidbits from this article. Daisy Jones & The Six's budget was more than $14 million (!!!) per episode. Swarm's budget was around $4.3 million per episode. Only 37% of people in the US who started The Rings of Power completed it. https://www.hollywoodreporter.c…
This paints a terribly unflattering picture. Lord of the Rings having only a 37% completion rate, after what they spent, is so bad. I mostly liked it, but $1 billion should get you more than a pretty good show that 2/3 of viewers don't finish. https://twitter.com/...
Hollywood creatives see Amazon as one of the most challenging and confusing places to work. @kimmasters digs into the spending and the ego clashes. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ...
The Lord of the Rings 37%/45% completion rate will probably get most of the headlines, but this section about A League of Their Own is eye-opening: https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
This is a really interesting news story about the failed TV show a league of their own, and the Studio's refusal to accept that audiences weren't interested in certain themes, so they just got rid of the system that told them this instead of listening and then the show flopped. h…