Almost without herald, the new series of Constantine has premiered in the UK on Amazon Prime. One chain-smoking Scouse exorcist and dabbler of the dark arts later, the TV landscape looks subtly different.
The roots of all this lie back in February earlier this year, back before Amazon Prime Video launched, when Amazon and Warner Bros. International Television Distribution inked a deal for streaming rights to a brace of properties (Arrow, The Following, Hostages, Revolution and The 100) following their linear UK broadcast runs.
Constantine, as anybody who has read the original source material will tell you, has somewhat upped the ante as is his wont; the show debuting exclusively in the UK hours after its US first screening.
Presumably Amazon has some first look rights to the show as part of its wider deal with Warner Bros. — owners of DC comics, incidentally, Constantine’s original home — and as an untried proposition from a largely untried stable it might not have attracted the same sort of bidding attention as some other US properties. But it does signal a certain amount of intent and the historical precedent is that when the number of bidders sitting round a table rises, so the price does too.
And yes, Amazon has done this before earlier this year with the 13-part Extant from CBS. But then it made a righteous song and a dance about it. The fact that so little fanfare attended Constantine suggests that there will be more of this thing in the future.
Sky paid HBO £150m back in 2010 for a five-year deal to snap up the exclusive UK and Irish TV rights to HBO's archive, new programming and a first-look deal on all co-productions, and earlier this year paid an undisclosed sum to extend that to 2020 (Sky Deutschland did a similar thing in September). Sky must be fervently hoping that Amazon, and a few other OTT rivals, will have fallen by the wayside by the time it comes to extend again…
(As for Constantine, the first show was great, the second was wobbly...it might have to raise its game to make another season.)
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