Rights to the “The Lord Of The Rings” properties are not easy to suss out. Film rights have lapsed from Warner Bros. apparently, video game rights are up for sale, but the TV rights to tell Tolkien-approved “Lord Of The Rings” lies with Amazon Prime. And in true, big Jeff Bezos fashion, the company has pulled out all stops to try and create what might be the biggest and most expensive show on television: Amazon wants their own “Game of Thrones” essentially, and ‘LOTR’ might just be the way to achieve that goal. Now unwieldy called “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the show, which is about six months from debuting, is about to premiere its trailer at the Superbowl. With this big marketing milestone ahead of them, Amazon has decided to debut the show’s first look at Vanity Fair.
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First off, five seasons will likely cost the studio well over $1 billion, which is apparently ok with Jeff Bezos since he is a superfan of Tolkien. Peter Jackson, the creator of six ‘LOTR’ movies when you include the three ‘Hobbit’ prequels, is not involved, but he did dance around being some kind of supervisor on the show in its early days.
Showrun by Patrick McKay and JD Payne, while the pair don’t have a ton of credits to them (just an unproduced “Flash Gordon” film which they are writers and producers on), the pair were actually kind of a very in-demand writers team in the last few years, recruited to write on “Star Trek 3,” to try and salvage the unmade “Star Trek 4,” were writers on an unproduced “X-Men” live-action TV show and brought in to help “Jurassic World 2,” and were part of the writer’s room that Warner Bros. assembled for “Godzilla Vs. Kong.” So yes, while their IMDB is small, they have lots of genre experience.
Still, Amazon brought in some big guns to help them: “Game of Thrones” co-executive producer Bryan Cogman, who also wrote a lot of episodes and was tapped many times to try and create “Game of Thrones” spin-offs, stepped in as an adviser to them and they also tapped director J.A. Bayona (“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”). The legacy of Peter Jackson and his classic films weighs heavily on all of them.
“From the very beginning, I trusted these guys,” Bayona told Vanity Fair. “I knew what they were going through, and they knew what I was going through also, because can you imagine going back to such a beloved world and [facing] the high bar of the Peter Jackson movies? We were, all the time, very aware of the massive expectations.”
There’s a massive cast on “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” but mostly what you need to know to orient yourself is that its set thousands of years before Jackson’s films, and the Elf Queen Galadriel is now played by Morfydd Clark (“Saint Maud”). Other versions of younger characters like the immortal elves like Elrond, initially played by Hugo Weaving, could appear at one point too. But for now, it looks like Galadriel will be the main character that audiences recognize.
“Lord Of The Rings: Power Of The Rings” debuts on Amazon Prime on September 2, 2022. Check out the new images below and watch out for the first trailer on Superbowl Sunday.
