“Rings of Power” is set in Middle Earth, several thousand years before the events in “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” JRR Tolkien’s popular fantasy books. They are also set in Middle Earth. In this sense, “RoP” is the ultimate prequel. “LotR” is a trilogy consisting of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers,” and “The Return of the King.”
One of the things that’s shocking about the price tag is that none of the RoP seasons feature any big stars – meaning there are no big star salaries to pay. The biggest name in season 2 is the great Ciarán Hinds, who plays the dark wizard. Hinds is perhaps best known to viewers as Mance Rayder from “Game of Thrones.” That was also a very expensive series, ultimately costing just over a billion dollars to produce. But “GoT” consists of 73 episodes.
To be fair, the budget for RoP includes an estimated $1 billion payment to the Tolkien Estate for the television rights for up to five seasons of RoP, with work on Season 3 reportedly already underway.
The Return of the King contains more than 100 pages of appendices detailing the history of Middle Earth. RoP draws on this and offers new material approved by the estate. Simon Tolkien, the novelist’s grandson, is a consultant on the series.
Peter Jackson has adapted The Lord of the Rings for the big screen with great success. Each of the three films received critical acclaim and was a huge success. The Return of the King (2003) won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. Less successful was his adaptation of The Hobbit, where he made three films out of a book that was shorter than all the novels in the trilogy. Tolkien inflation is not just financial.
Three main characters from the trilogy appear in the Amazon series: Elrond (Robert Aramayo, another GoT alumnus); Galadriel (Morfydd Clark); and Sauron (Charlie Vickers). Elrond is half-elf, Galadriel is elf, and elves are immortal, so their existence for millennia is entirely plausible. As for Sauron, he’s pretty much the embodiment of evil, and, alas, if evil doesn’t last for millennia, nothing does.
In a presumably intentional twist, Vickers as Sauron looks very similar to Orlando Bloom as Legolas in the Lord of the Rings films and some of the Hobbit movies. Both look like boy band refugees. Some fantasies, it seems, are truly timeless.
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].
