After a tremendous wait since its announcement, Prime Video’s mindbogglingly expensive The Lord of the Rings series has somehow crept up on us a bit: Jeff Bezos must be sneaking around with muffled Hobbit feet or something…
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - Season 1
Premiering on September 2 with two episodes before releasing the entire eight-episode first season weekly from there, The Rings of Power is perhaps the streaming landscape’s most gargantuan, cinematic effort yet. So who’s involved in this thing, and how does it tie into J.R.R. Tolkien’s original literature? Scroll, you fools!
1. It is THE most expensive TV show ever made
Production on The Rings of Power’s first season apparently cost almost $500 million, and that’s after Amazon spent $250 million on the rights to use J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy canon for one season of TV. Considering that there’s a potential five-season arc in the works, we’re now talking about one billion dollaridoos being put towards the LOTR series, making it history’s most expensive episodic series.
All the other contenders for this dubious title are big genre epics too, like Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, and See, all of which command around $15 million per episode. But a billion, with a big ol’ B instead of an M? That’s a whole new ballpark, and proof of how intense the competition for our streaming attention has become.
2. It’s set in a time when the word “hobbit” hasn’t even been coined yet
We’ll see separate stories of elves, dwarves and men in The Rings of Power, rather than watching representatives of each race form some kind of…fellowship, let’s say, in a united mission to defeat evil. But, being set in Tolkien’s archaic Second Age, the story takes place thousands of years before The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, when an ancient ancestor of the hobbits known as “the Harfoots” (above) roamed Middle Earth instead.
The series’ creators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay said that the story will, duh, follow the forging and distribution of those pesky rings we later see Bilbo and Frodo corrupted by: “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all,” McKay told Vanity Fair. “It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.”
3. The show is intended for all ages—save for some scary, intense moments of battle
Unlike its predecessor in small-screen fantasy Game of Thrones, don’t expect any “sexposition” or graphic scenes of genitals getting snipped off in The Rings of Power. The show’s creators have said they want to follow in Tolkien’s literary footsteps, making a story that’s appropriate for young readers/viewers who won’t take a little sword-slinging action too seriously. In an interview with Empire, McKay confirmed “set-pieces, creatures, battles, and white-knuckle fights to the death” are on the way—combined with the trailer’s scary snow-troll, that might be the most adult it’s all gonna get.
4. LOTR superfan Stephen Colbert presented some teaser footage of a balrog at comic con
Speaking of fab LOTR monsters, a balrog (much like the one that “killed” Gandalf) made a guest appearance in exclusive Rings of Power footage premiered at San Diego Comic Con for superfans. After shaking Hall H with composer Bear McReary’s live performance, the huge 25-person presentation led by late night comedian and The Hobbit cameo performer Stephen Colbert kept its cards pretty close to its chest.
What an amazing first Hall H panel!!!! #LOTR #RingsOfPower #SDCC2022 pic.twitter.com/PnB3aZ6czw
— Takas (@Takas86) July 22, 2022
There were five short segments of footage teased, some with Elrond undertaking a “Dwarven endurance test” and Galadriel reciting the famous “nine rings for men” prologue”, and fans erupted in cheers of recognition at seeing a fierce balrog emerge through flames. “Balrogs are sneaky”, Colbert summarised, confused at how one could appear in this chapter of Tolkien’s continuity.
5. Peter Jackson has said Amazon basically asked if he’d be involved, then ghosted
The Kiwi director’s tremendous, Oscar-collecting trilogy of films loom large over Amazon’s efforts to make a cinematic-looking TV series. As he revealed on The Hollywood Reporter’s awards podcast, Jackson was in fact consulted for his input on The Rings of Power. “They asked me if I wanted to be involved—Fran Walsh and I—and I said, ‘that’s an impossible question to answer without seeing a script.”
Those previewed scripts never arrived, apparently, and Jackson hasn’t heard anything since. But he’ll “be watching it”, and is even keen to enjoy a Tolkien story from the perspective of “a perfectly neutral viewer”, rather than having the fantasy legacy resting on his shoulders.
6. A few Game of Thrones alums have switched teams to show up in The Rings of Power
The new series’ sprawling cast is relatively unrecognisable to us, with no established big names like Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen around to break our immersion in an ancient fantasy world. But a few of the cast members have previously dabbled in the rival high fantasy of GOT: Robert Aramayo, whose character is covered just below, previously played a young Eddard Stark in flashbacks of the HBO show.
The more mysterious casting buzz surrounds Joseph Mawle, once known as the kind and resilient Uncle Benjen Stark on GoT. All we know is that his villainous character’s name is Oren, but he might be playing the Witch-king of Angmar, or even the dark lord Sauron himself—the franchise’s greatest contender for the nebulous title of “lord of the rings”, being the primary antagonist who forged the disastrous One Ring.
7. Prepare to meet a young Galadriel and Elrond
Back to Aramayo, who stands to the left of Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel in the promo pic above. He’s taking over from Hugo Weaving as a younger version of the half-Elven architect and politician Elrond. Yep, the haughty douche who tried to keep Arwen and Aragorn apart.
Reinventing a part later played by Cate Blanchett, Morfydd Clark is best known for her terrifying lead role in Saint Maud. She’s equally willing to risk body and soul here, depicting Galadriel as a fierce Elven warrior rather than the elegant fairy-like mentor we know she’ll become.
8. That somewhat clunky title looks way better in molten steel
We still aren’t sure about the repetitive, simplistic title of Prime Video’s Tolkien take-off: really, the word “rings” used once on each side of the semi-colon? Admittedly The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings already went there, but you’d perhaps expect a brand new title to try something a bit more distinctive.
“This is a title that we imagine could live on the spine of a book next to J.R.R. Tolkien’s other classics,” showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have said, and it certainly looks formidable in the teaser title announcement vid above, where artisans pour smooth metal out in the shape of each ornate letter. Really hard to believe it’s not CGI, and yet…
9. Pilot director J.A. Bayona has proven experience telling stories on an epic scale
The Mexican fantasy filmmaker has been tapped to film the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, perhaps because of how wondrously he’s showed us devastating tsunamis (The Impossible), mystical beings (A Monster Calls), and Jurassic World’s unleashed beasties (Fallen Kingdom). Other directors involved in the series include dependable Doctor Who fave Wayne Che Yip and The Witcher and Jupiter’s Legacy helmer Charlotte Brändström.
10. Howard Shore returns to Middle Earth to compose the series’ title music
Shore’s work on the original The Lord of the Rings franchise will forever be linked to those visuals of sweet Shire villages and epic high fantasy battles. Thank goodness Amazon got him to compose the new series’ orchestral main title theme, a lovely complement to the original hours of music series composer Bear McCreary had devised over the past year. McCreary has credited Shore with inspiring the new stuff, but confirmed that it’s a totally “new musical journey to Middle Earth”, with two singles from the score available to check out right now on Amazon Music.
11. Don’t worry: the showrunners know how it’s all gonna end
McKay and Payne have said that season one of The Rings of Power will cover 10 chapters of a 50-chapter-long story (and keep in mind that the rights to each of those chapters begin at $250 million…). After countless more millions and years of waiting, the guys claim that we’ll end the series on a final frame they had planned from the very beginning. It’s a bit of an epic journey even getting to the end of reading the show’s title, so concluding this epic and high-pressure undertaking will be a truly fantastical feat.
Personally speaking? We hope the final image is of the One Ring talking directly to the audience—”I guess you’re wondering how I got here”—played by the indomitable Andy Serkis in mo-cap magic funded by Bezos. And speaking of the eggheaded billionaire oligarch…
12. Bezos himself is apparently a LOTR fan, and says it’s not all about money
He’s no longer the CEO of Amazon, just the executive chairman of the board, but Bezos still had the clout to personally get involved in the series’ rights negotiations. He said to Time that he hopes to “do Tolkien’s work justice, that “it goes beyond making a commercially successful show…everyone working on the show read these stories as kids and our hearts are in it.” Does he see himself as a wise elf, humble dwarf, or a powerful guy like Sauron, though?
live footage of my timeline anytime new rings of power content drops pic.twitter.com/yLq9p8nuns
— may ☁️ (@ceIebrians) August 13, 2022
However The Rings of Power goes down, it’ll certainly cause the kind of unhinged, fanboy conspiracy we see in the It’s Always Sunny meme above. Let’s hope that Prime Video can show us the heights of Middle Earth, rather than another middling fantasy adaptation…
