Orcs, trolls, and wargs beware! Amazon Studios is bringing audiences back to the lands of Middle-earth with a new prequel series set before the events of The Lord of the Rings — and rumor has it that the first season will hit Prime Video by 2021.
Amazon issued a press release in November 2017 confirming the acquisition of global television rights for The Lord of The Rings and its intent to produce a prequel series with a multiseason commitment. The series is reported to “explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring,” and the deal also includes rights for a potential spinoff series. (There’s been no official word as to whether it will also predate the events of The Hobbit, too.) Here’s everything we know about the show so far.
Warning: Spoiler alert!
Will it be a ranger’s tale?
According to a May 2018 report from Lord of the Rings fan site TheOneRing.net — and take this with a massive grain of salt, because nothing has been officially confirmed — the first season of the series will follow a young Aragorn (portrayed in the Peter Jackson trilogy by Viggo Mortensen) in the time preceding the events of Fellowship of the Ring.
[BREAKING] We have confirmed from multiple sources that @AmazonStudios new billion-dollar #LOTR series will open its first season centered on a young Aragorn.
Let's discuss whats available and how this opens up Tolkien's Legendarium. A thread. #Tolkien
/1 pic.twitter.com/mfbkf4jyX6— TheOneRing.net (@theoneringnet) May 16, 2018
That report was eventually challenged, however, when Amazon released a map of Middle-earth at the time when the series is set. The map revealed several landmarks in Tolkien’s fictional universe that seemed to indicate the show’s timeline would begin hundreds of years before Aragorn was even born.
The landmarks and the timeline that now seems more likely for the series were explained in a thread on Twitter posted by user tolkienthot.
SO BARAD-DÛR
UNLESS MY MEMORY FAILS ME, IT WAS BUILT APPROX. 2000 YEARS (OR CLOSE) INTO THE SECOND AGE. HOWEVER:
It was destroyed after Sauron’s defeat by The Last Alliance of Men and rebuilt thousands of years later when Sauron returned. pic.twitter.com/1MFlLO3wOy— ???????????? ???????????????????????????????????????? (@tolkienthot) March 6, 2019
Minas Anor didn’t become MINAS TIRITH until AFTER Osgiliath and Ithil were lost by Gondor. I’m beginning to become quite confident that show most definitely isn’t about Young Aragorn.
This is WAY before he was born. Give or take 931 years. pic.twitter.com/Gwe97u6P0L
— ???????????? ???????????????????????????????????????? (@tolkienthot) March 6, 2019
Middle-earth, revisited
In February 2019, Amazon released an interactive map of Middle-earth featuring the lands that will be featured in the upcoming live-action series.
????️ ???? Explore the map: https://t.co/z9WOqI9Seo
— The Lord of the Rings on Prime (@LOTRonPrime) February 15, 2019
The map was revealed via a pair of posts on Twitter, with the first introduced with a passage from the original saga reading, “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky …” A follow-up post offered a link to the interactive map, which lets users zoom in and out on various locations throughout Middle-earth.
A second map was released in March, offering a few more details about the landscape at the time of the series.
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne. In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. pic.twitter.com/hRmGQbOhLj
— The Lord of the Rings on Prime (@LOTRonPrime) March 6, 2019
Target date and more
In an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jennifer Salke — the recently installed head of Amazon Studios — divulged lots of interesting information regarding the action plan for Amazon over the next few years. The Lord of the Rings series came up, as you might expect, and Salke offered some tidbits worth sharing.
Most prominently, Salke confirmed that Amazon is targeting a 2021 debut for the series, even saying some involved parties would prefer 2020. Salke also says negotiations with Peter Jackson are ongoing, and that the two haven’t yet made a decision regarding his involvement or its capacity. She says that, instead of finding a showrunner and allowing that person to assemble a group of writers, Amazon plans to source talented writers and then elevate one to a position of leadership.
Wait, how much money?
Several months after the acquisition, more details of the deal emerged, with The Hollywood Reporter indicating that the series has a five-season commitment and a budget that will collectively amount to more than $1 billion. That massive sum — one of the largest budgets any series has ever been granted from the start — doesn’t include the spinoff series that’s also expected to come out of the primary show. The entire arrangement is contingent on the series beginning production within two years, so the project appears to be on a fast track.
Also mentioned among the reported details is the potential for “material from the films” to be used in the series, and the possibility that The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit franchise director Jackson could also be involved in the show. According to the report, Jackson’s attorney, Peter Nelson, “helped start a dialogue between Jackson and Amazon” regarding the series. Whether Jackson gets involved is entirely up to him, the report claims.
The first reports regarding Amazon entering a bidding war for the rights to properties related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings and Hobbit series emerged late in 2017, with CEO Jeff Bezos personally involved in those negotiations. According to Variety, Amazon had designs from the start on producing a multiseason television series based on the books, with Bezos hoping that the show can become the “next Game of Thrones” (in terms of ubiquity). While it’s rare for a CEO to engage in such matters directly, Tolkien’s work is a particularly valuable property.
The show will be produced by Amazon Studios in collaboration with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema, and could be a major coup for Amazon, which has had success with original series like Transparent and The Man in The High Castle, but has yet to produce a “must-see” series like Game of Thrones or Netflix’s Stranger Things. The yet-to-be-named series will be an Amazon Prime exclusive, and we don’t yet know when it will see the light of day.
The initial news came on the heels of a shake-up at the executive level of Amazon’s original programming division, with president Roy Price departing under the cloud of a sexual harassment scandal. Executives Joe Lewis and Conrad Riggs departed soon afterward, and executive Morgan Wandell jumped ship for Apple, which is looking to bolster its own original series efforts.
From the start, there were some eye-popping numbers involved in the deal. The rights payments alone for the property are reportedly in the $200 to $250 million range. According to the report, that payment had to be made sight unseen before a single line had been written or actor had been cast.
Updated on March 6, 2019: Added information regarding the focus of the series gleaned from maps released by Amazon.