If there is one thing that Amazon Prime Video seems more than capable of doing, it’s making a big thing out of something relatively small. They proved that today with the arrival of a minute-long title reveal trailer for their upcoming Lord of The Rings series ahead of the launch in September this year. The video features a slow-building visual of mists and fires, the forging of rings and a recital of Tolkien’s text, “Three rings for the Elven Kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone. Nine for mortal men, doomed to die. One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne. In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.” At the end of the poem, the title of Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power is revealed.
Of course, the spoken words miss out the final, and probably best known, part of the text, which any Tolkien fan will know reads: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” However, there is an excellent reason this well-known section has been omitted from the teaser, because as showrunners J.D. Payne & Patrick McKay explained, the series is about what came before the forging of the One Ring.
“This is a title that we imagine could live on the spine of a book next to J.R.R. Tolkien’s other classics. The Rings of Power unites all the major stories of Middle-earth’s Second Age: the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Until now, audiences have only seen on-screen the story of the One Ring – but before there was one, there were many… and we’re excited to share the epic story of them all.”
Amazon’s Lord of The Rings Will Expand Tolkien’s World On Screen Beyond The Well-Known Trilogy
When Amazon first announced their billion-dollar Lord of The Rings project, they immediately made it clear that this would not be a reworking of Peter Jackson’s movies. Set thousands of years before a hobbit called Frodo Baggins took on the epic task of attempting to destroy the One Ring, the series will dip into the many additional volumes of text that Tolkien wrote about the history of Middle-Earth. Beginning, very much like Lord of The Rings, in a time when peace seems complete, a whole new cast of characters will come to terms with the emergence of evil that casts a shadow that threatens all of Middle-Earth.
The huge cast includes Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Maxim Baldry, Nazanin Boniadi, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards, Trystan Gravelle, Sir Lenny Henry, Ema Horvath, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, Tyroe Muhafidin, Sophia Nomvete, Lloyd Owen, Megan Richards, Dylan Smith, Charlie Vickers, Leon Wadham, Benjamin Walker, Daniel Weyman, and Sara Zwangobani.
Having been in development for five years, Amazon spent almost $250 million for the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s original texts and made the unheard-of commitment to making five seasons at a total cost of around $1 billion, making it the most expensive TV series ever created. Although having this kind of money on the line would usually lead to some uncertain times and sleepless nights, for Amazon’s execs, there has never been a more certain hit in television history.