The Grand Tour Pulls Nearly $11 Million in Season One

Despite mixed reviews and extravagant expenses, the new Clarkson, Hammond, and May show is a winner.

byJustin Hughes|
Culture photo
Share

0

Hopes were high for The Grand Tour, the latest television endeavor by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May, and producer Andy Wilman. After their enormous success on Top Gear, expectations were through the stratosphere. Some critics were harsh, and others thought that spending $3 million on the show's opening scene was ludicrous. It probably was, but the numbers are in—the first season of The Grand Tour made a tidy profit of £8.39 million before taxes, nearly $11 million American dollars, according to AOL UK.

This must make Amazon particularly happy, being the winner among many media companies who tried to snag the former Top Gear presenters after Jeremy Clarkson's infamous "fracas" that resulted in him being fired from the BBC program. Hammond, May, and Wilman refused to work without Clarkson and formed their own company, W. Chump and Sons, to produce a new automotive program. Though not every part of The Grand Tour is a hit—"Celebrity Brain Crash," where guests suffer a horrible death immediately before appearing on the show got a bit old after the first episode—the chemistry, entertainment, and brilliance of Clarkson, Hammond, and May is as strong as ever, leading to the show's positive reception.

While Amazon hasn't given a firm release date of season two of The Grand Tour, The Telegraph reports that at a Facebook Live Q&A in February, Jeremy Clarkson confirmed that it would be released "this year," with James May adding that it would "go out this year at the same time the last one went out—whenever that was." That would mean we can expect it sometime this fall. Richard Hammond has had not one, but two serious accidents during the filming of The Grand Tour this year. Let's hope he's done pretending to be a crash test dummy. All that profit won't do him any good if he's not around to spend it.

stripe
Culture