A big shift at the intersection between Hollywood and streaming land tonight, as Variety reports that Jennifer Salke, studio head for Amazon MGM, is stepping down from her position atop the tech company’s film and TV efforts. Salke has been in charge of Amazon’s shows and movies—and then its more blockbuster-y ambitions since buying up MGM back in 2022—since 2018, having taken over Amazon Studios after a stint at NBC. In her time at Amazon, Salke has overseen some very major—and very expensive—shifts in the tech company’s efforts to carve out streaming and cinematic prestige for itself, most recently a reportedly very pricey move to wrest control of the James Bond franchise away from the Broccoli family that’s run it for the last several decades.

Salke’s departure comes as Amazon continues to wrestle with a fairly basic question, i.e., “How much cash can you just sort of throw at TV and movies in the hopes of generating hits?” She oversaw TV series The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power and Citadel, for instance, both of which saw the tech company spend lavishly to try to get some of that “legitimate TV network” heat, to decidedly mixed success. The fact is that Amazon has seemed to squirm for years under the pressure of figuring out what sort of streamer it wants to be: Before Salke’s tenure, it was mostly notable for indie hits like Transparent, but, especially since the MGM acquisition, it’s had all its biggest successes, at least in terms of numbers, by going strictly down the the middle of the road. It’s not for nothing that its biggest TV hit in recent years has been Reacher, an action procedural about a very big man who hits people, while its had its biggest film hits by pulling from such exotic wells as “Yet another Rocky film.” (Critically, meanwhile, the studio has gotten its best buzz by going more extreme, with gory TV shows like The Boys and Fallout, both of which have scored Emmy nominations.)

Salke will be moving into producing full-time, while her job is, basically, being eliminated: Amazon will no longer be running its film and TV production through a single executive, instead leaving each in the hands of current film head Courtenay Valenti and TV head Vernon Sanders, both reporting directly to Prime Video head Mike Hopkins. What this means for two divisions that have basically been in a footrace to see who can out-spend the other in the name of The Great God Content remains to be seen.

More from A.V. Club