You might already know that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May signed a deal with Amazon to produce a brand new car show. Truth be told, the departing Top Gear crew isn’t cheap to get a hold on and Amazon’s $250 million check confirmed that.
Yes, according to the Financial Times, that’s how much money the company paid to secure a three-season, 36-episode motoring show.
Mind you, that’s not the salary given to the presenters (including former Top Gear long-time executive Andy Wilman), but the whole production budged available for the show’s next three seasons. In fact, if we do a basic math calculation, that comes down to $6.9 million per episode – including crew, salary, equipment, transport and all sorts of other things. The amount of work that goes into filming and editing is mind-boggling.
Compared to the BBC’s budget dedicated to the show, Amazon’s offering might be quite substantial as Clarkson was recorded stating this regarding the move: “I feel like I’ve climbed out of a biplane and into a spaceship.”
Furthermore, in an 2011 interview with the Telegraph, Andy Wilman said that the whole production crew frequently exceeded the budget:
“We rarely stay within budget. We’ll go six figures over sometimes, then we get told off. But they don’t send the bailiffs. Every show has had to go through a budget cut and we were not excluded from that, but BBC Worldwide also puts money into the show. They’re selling it to 100 countries, so we’ve got a stronger argument to go to them and say get your wallet out. The presenters’ salaries haven’t gone up exponentially with the success of the show. Ultimately it’s a BBC Two show, there simply isn’t the budget to top-load their salaries and they all know that. You can’t start giving Louis Walsh money out.”
Well, maybe this time, blowing through $6.9 million per episode won’t be that easy.
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