Amazon shakes up streaming leadership team

Amazon introduced this week that Jennifer Salke is stepping down as the pinnacle of Amazon MGM Studios — a transfer that would point out high-level dissatisfaction with the corporate’s streaming technique over the previous few years.

To be clear, Salke’s boss Mike Hopkins (the pinnacle of Amazon MGM Studios and Prime Video) praised her work in an email to employees and described her departure as one that enables the corporate to “flatten our management construction a bit” — a recurring theme in current tech firm layoffs.

In different phrases, Amazon doesn’t intend to fill Salke’s function. As a substitute, the heads of its movie and TV studios report on to Hopkins.

However the reporting round Salke’s departure highlights Amazon’s streaming disappointments and challenges below her management. Beforehand an exec at NBC, Salke joined Amazon Studios in 2018, as the corporate was seeking to develop past critically praised motion pictures and exhibits into extra mainstream hits.

The streamer has had its share of successes since then, together with “Reacher,” “Jack Ryan,” “Fallout,” and “The Boys.” It additionally made a giant wager on “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Energy,” a present whose premiere drew a record audience for Amazon, however which has not confirmed to be the world-conquering phenomenon that you simply’d hope for with a reported budget of more than $1 billion.

After which there’s “Citadel,” an espionage present designed because the epicenter of a fictional universe of world spinoffs like “Citadel: Diana” and “Citadel: Honey Bunny.” Intensive reshoots reportedly turned “Citadel” into the second most expensive show ever made (behind solely “The Rings of Energy”), however its reception has been much more underwhelming. The Hollywood Reporter says the second season has been delayed from fall 2025 to spring 2026, with additional spinoffs placed on maintain.

Amazon has additionally struggled to get one other James Bond movie into manufacturing, following its acquisition of MGM in 2022. Producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli (longtime Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was their father) maintained inventive management of the franchise, and a Wall Street Journal report in December advised that Barbara Broccoli was significantly sad with Amazon — she was apparently aggravated in an early assembly when Salke referred to Bond as “content material,” and she or he was even reported to have described the tech big’s group as “idiots.”

One other supply stated that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was, in flip, so angered by the WSJ story about Broccoli that he declared, “I don’t care what it takes, eliminate her,” with the corporate subsequently paying Wilson and Broccoli to surrender management.

Salke’s identify was noticeably missing from Amazon’s triumphant announcement of the Bond deal. She is going to, nonetheless, be beginning a brand new movie and TV manufacturing firm with a first-look deal at Amazon.