Are Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May worth the $350 million Amazon paid to secure their services? No according to a senior executive at Netflix.
Neil Hunt the Chief Product Officer at the streaming giant, recently told DigitalSpy that he feels the astronomic fee paid by Amazon for the former hosts of the BBC motoring show Top Gear was too much. He told the website:
"We have past episodes of Top Gear, so we have a pretty good gauge of what audiences like,"
Our buying decisions tend to be somewhat data-driven. We have a lot of data to get the deals we want, so there we go. Clearly it wasn't worth the money to make the deal... I think they sold themselves for way more money [than they're worth]."
The trio were part of a highly publicized bidding war that involved Netflix, Amazon, and British TV networks like ITV. In the end, they choice Amazon, a company that's pushing hard to rival Netflix in the original content market.
The E-commerce titan is giving the threesome a budget of around $6.6 million dollars an episode. The show is already penciled in for a minimum of 36 episodes over the next three years. Couple that with the reported $21 million a year each Clarkson and co. will be making in salary and it's easy to see why Netflix was reluctant to bring them aboard.
Top Gear is without question one of the biggest draws in TV. It holds the Guinness World Record as the world's most widely watched factual TV program and often boasts of worldwide viewership in the hundreds of millions.
Will all that translate into success for Amazon? We'll have to wait until the first episodes start rolling off the production in line in 2016 to find out.
