The Lord of the Rings Prequel Officially Has a Name

I’ll refrain from repeating my rant about reboots here, since I already included a full version for The Matrix: Resurrections, but suffice it to say that this first teaser for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings reboot, officially titled The Rings of Power, doesn’t succeed at convincing me that this is a good idea.

Tolkien’s original Lord of the Rings was a trilogy of three books, so Peter Jackson made three movies out of it, and they were pretty good movies. Then he decided to make another three movies out of a single book, The Hobbit, and that may have been too many movies. And now Amazon has decided that it would be a good idea to make a Lord of the Rings prequel, set thousands of years before the original, mind, that spans what we can only assume will be multiple seasons, just to explain how the rings of power were originally forged.

Listen, I know everyone wants to make the next Game of Thrones, and admittedly I am enough of a fan to find this vague rereading of the famous ring poem exciting, but bear in mind that producing a single season of this new show reportedly cost Amazon $465 million. Yes, you read that right, $465,000,000 for one season, or around $46.5 million per episode, assuming a ten episode run. In fact, New Zealand’s Minister for Economic Development and Tourism reportedly called it “the largest television series ever made.”

Could that money not have gone to, I don’t know, fighting global poverty? Or addressing climate change? Or, if Amazon must, even a more interesting show? Could $465 million not have been spent on literally anything other than another Lord of the Rings reboot?

Alas, Amazon is unconvinced. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on September 2nd, 2022.