Amazon Prime Video dropped the ‘bombshell’ back in 2017: it was buying the TV rights to The Rings of Power for 250 million. The purchase implied a five-season commitment worth at least one billion.
Amazon Prime Video has its own weapon to try to win loyalists from this season. The streaming platform premieres this Friday the first series of the saga The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. R. Tolkien, which already has its own movies. To the small screen comes under the title The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the most expensive fiction in history.
Screenwriters JD Payne and Patrick McKay (both have worked on Jungle Cruise and Goliath) sign this project along with producer Lindsey Weber (Overland, Star Trek Beyond), which arrives on September 2 to the film and series service.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has taken five years to be made. As its creators tell it, when they found out that the audiovisual giant had bought the rights to the literary saga and they were looking for proposals, they decided to bet on a completely new project, set thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, in the Second Age. However, unlike the previous blockbusters, in this case, the story is not based on any book of the trilogy.
The screenwriters have constructed the plot by spinning together data from the appendices of the novels, as well as information from the stories in the original books. “It was almost like finding dinosaur bones and starting to put them together“, they acknowledged at the press conference.
