Amazon's Prime Video Is Now a Tens-of-Billions-a-Year Business, Jassy Says
Four years after buying MGM for $8.5 billion, Amazon says its streaming arm is profitable and firing on every cylinder, from box office hits to NFL football.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy delivered an unusually specific number on the company's quarterly earnings call Thursday: Prime Video now has a revenue run rate in the tens of billions of dollars and is profitable on its own. It's the clearest sign yet that Amazon's bet on Hollywood is paying off.
Jassy had already told investors back in May that Prime Video turned a profit. What's new is the scale. A "tens of billions of dollars" run rate puts the streaming business in rarefied territory among Amazon's lines of business, and it comes four years after the company spent $8.5 billion to acquire MGM, a deal that at the time drew plenty of skepticism about whether Amazon could actually compete with Hollywood's legacy studios.
This year's results suggest it can. Amazon MGM Studios has pulled in more than $1.2 billion in global box office revenue so far in 2026, according to figures Amazon shared. The headline driver is Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling-led adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, which grossed an estimated $684 million worldwide according to The Numbers and became the studio's highest-grossing release ever. Verity also contributed to the haul. Not every swing connected, though: Melania was a notable miss for the studio this year.
On the television side, Jassy rattled off a list of shows he's counting as hits: Carrie, The Summer I Turned Pretty, The Boys, Off Campus, Fallout, and Reacher. Reacher in particular has become a franchise in its own right. Season 4 pulled in 66 million global viewers in its first 28 days, the company says. Season 5 is already filming, and Amazon has picked up the show for a sixth season, meaning Reacher's role as a subscriber magnet isn't going away anytime soon.
Sports Is Doing Heavy Lifting
Streaming originals get the headlines, but live sports may be the bigger story for Prime Video's bottom line. The service holds rights to NASCAR, the Masters, and UEFA Champions League soccer, but Thursday Night Football has emerged as this year's standout performer. The first six games of the current NFL season averaged 17.7 million viewers, a 16% jump from last year, according to Nielsen data Amazon shared on the call.
The NBA deal is paying dividends too. Prime Video's second season of NBA coverage drew more than 2 million viewers, per Nielsen. For a company that only recently became a serious player in live sports broadcasting, those numbers signal that Amazon has figured out how to turn marquee sports rights into sustained viewership, not just a one-season novelty.
Taken together, the box office wins, the TV hits, and the sports ratings paint a picture of a streaming business that's no longer a loss-leader bundled in with Prime shipping perks. It's generating real revenue and real profit, at a scale that puts it alongside Amazon's other major businesses. The MGM acquisition, once viewed as a pricey gamble into a notoriously difficult industry, now looks like it's delivered exactly what Amazon was hoping for: a content engine that keeps Prime subscribers engaged and increasingly pays for itself.
The next test will be whether Amazon MGM Studios can keep producing box office hits on the scale of Project Hail Mary, and whether the Thursday Night Football and NBA viewership gains hold up as the novelty of Amazon's sports push wears off.
