The Grand Tour

Netflix Executive Questions the Production Budgets of The Grand Tour

Long before The Grand Tour premiered last Friday, there was quite a public battle between the major on-demand players in entertainment to lock down Jeremy Clarkson, Andy Wilman, Richard Hammond, & James May.

Knowing how wildly successful Top Gear had been for such a long time, several companies had a good idea of how much money there was to be made from creating a relationship with the trio and producing their show. Two of the players who made the most serious offers were Amazon and Netflix.

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According to several sources, each episode of The Grand Tour costs in the neighborhood of about £4.5 million to produce, with over £160 million total, rumored to have been fronted. That’s far from chump change, even for the big boys.

At some point, Netflix decided that the project wasn’t for them. Now it would seems that the execs over at Netflix may be bitter over the success of the show.

 

In an interview with The Telegraph, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos told them “We knew what it was worth….we made a play for that show, definitely, but we’ve had every season of Top Gear on Netflix in most territories in the world, so we had a better sense than most of what the audience was for Top Gear on our platform.”

When The Telegraph posed the question of whether or not the production of the show was worth what Amazon was paying for it Sarandos replied:

“That’s an under-reported number. It was about a quarter of a billion dollars.”

We’ll be able to figure out later what it was that made the show the show. It’ll be interesting with Grand Tour to see how much of that is the players, who in many cases are big personalities, but what elements of Top Gear will people miss?”

 

It sounds like Sarandos has yet to learn what everybody else already knew. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May ARE what made Top Gear a success. Likewise, they are also what has made The Grand Tour a success. That is not to say there aren’t a lot of hard-working people who have put their own blood, sweat, and tears into the making of the show, but without those three, we have already seen what can happen to a motoring show.

Source: Digital Spy

Nick Dunlap

Nick is a lifelong automotive enthusiast, as well as journalist, and content creator. Nick also successful competes in a variety of automotive fields including national level car shows, autocross, SCCA races, and more. He enjoys designing and building a variety of cars and helping others do the same with theirs.

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7 Comments

  1. Original Topgear had over 300 million viewers world wide. BBC is the biggest loser…….Netflix missed the boat. ….BEST F….ING CAR SHOW EVER.

  2. I had watched every episode of top gear several times before any of the seasons were added to netflix. therefore didn’t have a great need to watch much of top gear through netflix. And any new episodes back when the three boys were still on top gear were not available therefore I didn’t watch them on netflix either. I believe that the people of netflix thought they had a good estimate of the show through there personal viewer stats, when in reality they weren’t even close. I became a Amazon Prime member purely for this one show as I’m sure may others have. I’m sure Amazon will do just fine and I’m excited to see what The Grand Tour has in store.

  3. Now….see what happens when you CHEAP OUT? Netflix is about to become #2 behind Amazon, and may be already.

  4. First of all, netflix stopped having every season of Top Gear, years ago, as a result I no longer watch Top Gear on Netflix. Secondly, most of the episodes that aired on Netflix (at least in the US) were the made for America version, which means that instead of having an epic soundtrack they replaced all the good songs with b-roll stock music that sounds like garbage.

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