“The market is crazy, as you saw with the Knives Out deal,” explains Salke. “This is a full season of a huge world-building show. The number is a sexy headline or a crazy headline that’s fun to click on, but that is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series.” “[It] is a crazy world and various people on this Zoom, mostly Bela [Netflix’s Bela Bejaria] and me, have been in bidding situations where it starts to go incredibly high,” confesses Salke. “There’s a lot of wooing and we have to make decisions on where we want to stretch and where we want to draw the line. As for how many people need to watch Lord of the Rings? A lot. (Laughs.) A giant, global audience needs to show up to it as appointment television, and we are pretty confident that that will happen.”
