Amazon Prime Video isn’t even trying to make good content

Amazon Prime Video is a strange streaming service. It offers original shows and movies as well as titles it’s paid for to curate its library. While you pay a subscription fee to gain access to the service, you can also pay for additional channels to add on to the service; you can also buy or rent new movies.

Perhaps most notable is that Prime Video is a smart part of Amazon, a company that strives for world domination by accessing every part of your life through a wide range of its own products and services. That’s in addition to the massive online outlet it operates. Amazon, more than any other service (even Netflix), is run on automation, algorithms, and squeezing every penny out of every situation in order to make the most profit. It’s not trying to be good; it’s just trying to make money. And that’s evident when you look at its original programming.

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Red One was a huge misfire

The Christmas spectacle didn’t need to be good

Amazon MGM Studios

Amazon’s Christmas Red One movie is a perfect example of how little it cares about what it’s making. Red One was all things terrible. It was a Christmas movie that wanted to feel like it was part of the Marvel universe. It employed Netflix’s blockbuster algorithm that churns out cold, empty films packed with attractive stars playing versions of themselves, and told an incomprehensible story that never felt the least bit entertaining or magical. It was similar to some recent Marvel movies in one way: the special effects were atrocious.

However, none of this really matters to Amazon. MGM Studios made the film and released it in theaters for a couple of weeks in November before dropping it on Prime Video ahead of Christmas. It didn’t really need to do well at the box office; it will live forever on Prime and be a recurring recommendation every holiday season. And inevitably, people will tune in (and zone out) because lots of people enjoy Christmas movies during the season. Amazon will make money because advertisers will want to be attached to a heavily-promoted Christmas film starring Dwayne Johnson.

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Prime Video searches for franchises

Big swings have mixed results

Prime Video

Amazon seems desperate to have a big, sprawling franchise it can milk, akin to the MCU or Stranger Things or even Batman. Basically, it wants anything where it can make a lot of content based around a single piece of IP, whether it’s other stories, pop-experiences, or merchandise. It’s been a mixed bag in their efforts so far (I’ll get to their latest move), putting a bunch of money into fantasy series based around The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings. They look pretty and have been fairly well-received, but certainly not with the acclaim and success Amazon was hoping for.

Efforts on the action-adventure side of things have been lukewarm at best. On Prime Video you can find a lot of what I like to describe as ‘dad shows,’ where a macho-type guy takes justice into his own hands and saves the world or solves the case or whatever. From Cross to The Terminal Man to Jack Ryan to Reacher, these shows are the TV version of books you’d find in an airport kiosk; just something familiar you want to enjoy for a short period of time that’s for a very specific, dedicated audience. It’s as close as Amazon can get to a brand.

Its biggest attempt at an action franchise in The Citadel failed pretty spectacularly. Amazon went ahead with two spinoffs of this story about spies before the main show could get off the ground, which it never did. Citadel just didn’t click, and Amazon was left with a bunch of big-budget content that no one really wanted to watch.

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James Bond found new owners

Amazon has a license to exploit

No one outside of Amazon seems to be happy with the recent news that Amazon MGM Studios has taken over the rights to the iconic spy James Bond. That’s because no one thinks Amazon won’t try to bled dry the franchise for every possible cent. James Bond has long been the anti-Marvel; a franchise with allure, excitement, and modest professionalism, in part because the movies are rare. Instead of a few films a year, there is one every few years. But with Amazon, it will be quick to profit off of popular intellectual property, andJames Bond will surely be popping up a lot in one way or another.

That might include spinoffs, a TV show, and a lot more movies. It will be about quantity instead of quality; and while not every James Bond is a great movie, they certainly have been memorable, eventful, and reflective of the times in which we live. A company like Amazon that is not inclined to have strong opinions that might upset a more reactionary fan base is certainly not going to have a lot to say about the world in a James Bond franchise where you need to have something to say about that world.

Jeff Bezos has not been shy about controlling what the Washington Post can and cannot write about. Considering he himself is a prototypical James Bond villain, it’s hard to say what will be seen as a real threat in the next movie.

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An influx of ads and commercials

Amazon has no shame for selling products

Every streaming service has turned to ads and commercials as a way to make money. Firstly, it’s worth congratulating these tech companies on coming up with a completely novel way to make money via entertainment that no one had ever thought of before! That is to say, it has only been 50 years or so of broadcasters interspersing movies and shows with commercials so that the networks can make money, but it’s easy to forget when you’re a company that thinks it’s changing the world.

Anyway, Amazon’s ad-push is particularly insidious because of its ecosystem. Amazon doesn’t just want you to buy things its advertisers are selling; Amazon is its own advertiser and wants to direct you to its marketplace. And for a company that strives to make shopping as easy as possible, rewarding subscribers with lightning-fast delivery even if it causes a serious toll on its human workers, there is plenty of opportunity to destroy entertainment. Amazon is already looking at ways to connect its shopping directly to what you’re watching, considering the ability to pause a show and immediately purchase an item you see on screen. Amazon will take product placements and interactive shopping to a new, disgusting, intrusive level and there will be no going back.

Every streaming service cares more about making money than making anything good, but Prime Video is in a unique spot where it doesn’t even need to think about quality. Run on an algorithm to maximize profit and backed by a massive ecosystem that has a lot of services and revenue streams, Prime Video doesn’t need to earn accolades or have a coherent plan in place. It can just keep making money.

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