Amazon Announces the Lord of the Rings TV Series Will Go 5 Seasons

Source – Amazon have confirmed they’re committed to making five seasons of the upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series.

Late last year Amazon took on both Netflix and HBO to secure the rights to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterwork for the small screen.

Eventually, though Amazon Studios triumphed, signing a landmark $250 million deal to begin production on the show within the next two years. …

According to rumours, the series won’t retell the story of the War of the Ring and will instead draw inspiration from the many appendices and notes Tolkien drafted.

The first season will reportedly focus on a young Aragorn following the ranger as he’s fostered by Elrond in Rivendell and learns the truth of his royal bloodline. …

Interestingly it seems that Amazon is using an anthology style approach to explore the world of Middle Earth, with each season focusing on a different character or appendices.

And with that, I just had a Nerdgasm powerful enough to kill a Balrog right in his own fiery/shadowy tracks. This is what you should be doing if you’re Amazon. When you’re the most powerful company in the world, the Mordor with Jeff Bezos as your Lord Sauron, you take on the biggest challenge in entertainment. Making a series out of the greatest work of epic fiction of all time.

This is what we’re going to need in our soon to be post-Game of Thrones world. Another fantasy series with the potential to not only match HBO’s landmark work, but actually raise the bar higher. Doing the math, a billion dollars in production for five seasons works out to about $20 million per episode. GoTs spends on average about $10 million. You don’t need the Mirror of Galadriel to see what kind of filmmaking you can pull off with a budget like that.

Or with source material like that. I can’t claim to be super familiar with JRR Tolkien’s appendices and notes Amazon plans to base Lord of the Rings on. Just that The Hobbit plus the LOTR trilogy is fantasy writing of such scale and vision that it launched an entire genre. The fact that bookstores (note: bookstores are still a thing) have a Fantasy section and adventure RPG games have evolved from boards and 20-sided dice to franchises like The Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft is because of Tolkien’s masterwork. The best point I’ve ever heard about LOTR is that Middle Earth is such a complete, fully-realized world that it’s as if Tolkien didn’t so much create it as discover it. That it always existed, and he brought it to our world.

My only concern is that whoever ends up as showrunner on this project treats the work with the reverence and respect it deserves, like Peter Jackson did with the movie version. And doesn’t take a giant, steaming Nazgul dump all over it, like Peter Jackson did with The Hobbit trilogy, which is an abomination. Give us real actors and actual sets and stunts that follow some semi-realistic laws of physics. Not CGI Elves running up crumbling staircases and fat Dwarves bouncing across rivers in a barrel. Do that, add in a few dragons and wizards and quality action scenes, and you’ll give this lifelong LOTR geek something to live for once the Game of Thrones-pocalypse happens. Supposedly they won’t even get started til the end of 2019, so let’s get at it. Fly, you fools.