To the surprise of few, I imagine due to the immense promotion it has received, ‘The Wheel of Time’ (‘Wheel of Time’) it has ended up being a success for Amazon Prime Video. The best premiere of the year and one of the five best in the history of the platform. This was confirmed by Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, in a statement to Deadline.
Obviously, there is no way to audit these statements due to that SVOD platforms do not share audience data —And when they are shared, they are internal metrics, not from third parties, with what that implies— but consultancies like Parrots or TV-I certify that, of course, there is some success.
According to the executive, in the first three days of broadcast (it premiered on Friday 19) the Serie “had tens and tens of millions of viewings ». Among the countries with the most views are the United States, Germany, India, Brazil, Canada and France.
A success that follows others such as the adaptation of Mass Effect and The Lord of the Rings
On the other hand, this success was quite necessary considering that the adaptation of the Robert Jordan novels it was a vital step in his ambitious plans for adaptations of fantasy and science fiction works. In Salke’s words:
“You will continue to see us investing in fantasy genres of all kinds, we have a genre-focused team on the ground at Studios that works tirelessly with our creative partners on this.”
In this sense, the following litmus tests are ‘The Lord of the Rings’, which will premiere on next September 2022 or the adaptation of the video game ‘Mass effect‘, which the platform is negotiating to develop soon.
At the moment they are in the early stages, but the intention is to make a series based on the science fiction franchise created by Casey Hudson, Drew Karpyshyn and Preston Watamaniuk. The video game, developed by BioWare and EA, follows a military veteran who must fight a race of machines that seeks to invade the Milky Way.