No movie has ever had a budget anywhere near $1.75 billion. This is more like... making the 5 most expensive movies of all time, in a row, and flopping all of them.
They absolutely did not need to speed a billion upfront on an unproven format. Nobody had tried this format before, so they could not have been confident that there was a market. They could have instead, for example, commissioned a few of their more promising shows and offered them for free to gauge interest in the format.
That's a completely different level of failure.