The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime)

I just stumbled across this crazy news https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/3/16605272/lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien-game-of-thrones-amazon-studios

And I....honestly don't know what to think about it. I mean sure, it would be interesting as hell to see a project like that re-visited and adapt more elements from the books, but still.....not even 20 years have passed and already remake time?

Seems like a really blatant cash-in just to compete with GoT.

edited 6th Nov '17 2:16:43 PM by Forenperser

There is the ghost of a chance it is an adaptation of The Silmarillion, and that's the only chance this project has.

If it’s a readaptation of the main Lord of the Rings...why? I mean, sometimes you get a readaptation as a TV show because the books were too compressed or something, but the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movies are collectively over 11 hours long. You could literally cut them into chunks and get a (admittedly really weirdly paced) TV show out of it. It would even be around a normal episode count.

Because the cuts aren’t actually all that substantial (except the Tom Bombadil thing and I really don’t blame Peter Jackson for that one) and a TV show would invariably look way less big in scale and overall it just seems kind of worthless and like was stated above, it’s an attempt to rip of Game of Thrones.

Seriously, you want to make a fantasy series? Go for the Belgariad or the Elenium. No one’s adapted David Edding’s stuff and it’s pretty good, if really archetypal. If you got to the sequel to the Elenium trilogy, the Tamuli trilogy, you’d probably be able to get a lot of funding out of China. Hell, maybe put actual effort into an adaptation of the Wheel of Time!

EDIT: Nevermind, Sony’s already doing a full Wheel of Time TV show so that one’s kind of off the table.

edited 7th Nov '17 5:37:20 AM by Zendervai

I'm not opposed to continuing with adapting Tolkien's Legendarium, it is almost absurdly extensive in a way very few fantasy series can hope to match. But the main LOTR trilogy is the most well-tread period of the whole thing.

The least you could do is adapt the Northern theater of the War, which we never glimpse in the films and only hear distant news of it in the books. Things like Thranduil (Legolas's dad) fighting amidst a raging fire against the Orcish invasion in the Battle Under the Trees, or King Dáin Ironfoot telling Sauron to go fuck himself and ending up locked in a fierce war against the Men of the East who storm Dale and the very gates of Erebor.

They made a show based on Batman... set before there was a Batman. They're planning a show based on Stargate... set before the opening of the Stargate. Betting dollars to rubles that if this ever takes off, it'll be a midquel set between The Hobbit and LOTR proper, focusing on the political dramas of the Alliance races, with the Orcs being a very distant threat. So yeah, as blatant a GOT rip-off as there can be.

I'm all for adapting great fantasy works, it's just that I reckon the mentality of current television producers doesn't exactly line-up with what made those works great to begin with. LOTR has extensive world-building, grand battles and high adventure across sweeping landscapes - all things the execs have virtually no interest in, as opposed to promoting their star pretty-faces and cutting budgets wherever possible - which explains the focus on personal or political dramas - you're basically filming talking heads in cosplay.

On the bright side, with T&A being the other obligatory element in modern "mature" television writing, I guess a whole bunch of steamy elf fanfics are about to become canon.

I wouldn't be that extreme. The project seems to have the approval of the Tolkien estate, and they're notoriously picky about that (even disdaining the Jackson films), so I'd expect something at least mildly more interesting.

Plus, it's Amazon, and if The Man in the High Castle proves anything, is that they can deliver with aplomb.

Knock on wood. To be fair, what put me off GOT and similar political dramas is the sense that all the squabbling of the upper crust has no bearing on the lives of ordinary people, apart from when it's making them actively worse. For all the spiel about inequality and social justice of the past five or so years, big budget studios still express an unwholesome fascination with the beautiful elite.

To contrast, both The Hobbit and LOTR are fundamentally about average Joes making a difference in events that affect the whole world. Both these aspects - down-to earth characters and matters of grand importance - are rare to find nowadays. One show that did it right was Rome, which unfortunately started the trend of grim and oversexed political dramas, completely ignoring the lower class aspects that actually made that story stand out from all the other Roman Revolution re-tellings before it.

Of course, I would also settle for a Warcraft-style epic of swords and sorcery, since those are nearly as rare. I hear The Shannara Chronicles got a second season though, maybe oughtta look it up.

Game of Thrones does have a pretty thankless job of adapting a book series with a monstrous cast of aristocrats squabbling among each other and making the world worse in the process, so I'd say it's only partially the show's fault. The books do start to dwell slightly more on common folk concerns in the later books, but in the most cumbersome Trapped by Mountain Lions way possible. The show does legitimately try to bring the smallfolk concerns into the forefront via the presence of Varys, whose single purpose in the show at times is to remind people that ultimately he's the only common man in the cast and the only one who gives a shit about common people. Regardless, I'm veering off-track here, as there's already two threads about GOT.

A "sword and sorcery"-ish LOTR show would be hard to fit unless you're doing an Aragorn spin-off and his travels as a Ranger across the land in the interim between the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, which is such a solid premise there's a famous fan film basically about that. (or more specifically, about how Aragorn found Gollum). Fantasy has long had this fascination for Tolkien's rangers, so it'd make some degree of sense (despite the fact both the Dùnedain rangers and the Ithíllien Rangers are a rather minor part of the Legendarium, really).

Aragorn certainly lived a colorful life enough to warrant an entire tv-show, specially since he is 87 years old by the time of LOTR, meaning he's been around for a while. Served in Rohan, fought the Men of the East, stormed Umbar, tracked down Gollum...

Outside of the general Silmarillion shenanigans, the best narrative would likely be the War against Angmar, which even features Hobbits (it's said the Shire sent a contingent of archers to help in the war).

edited 7th Nov '17 8:44:03 AM by Gaon

The Angmar War is an interesting proposition. The one thing that concerns me is that it might reek of Netflix MCU-ism - that is, the feeling you're stuck watching the B-team when the real action happening right now is someplace else. In that regard, a midquel between The Hobbit and LOTR could still work, so long as it's more action-oriented. Or maybe even an overall prequel about the Third Age in general. Or *gasp* a sequel even. Considering the amount of liberties they're already bound to make with the source material, they might as well set it after the War of the Ring and have the villains be Ork remnants and independent warlords and human mages (as weak as those are in Tolkien's works compared to fantasy in general). Something more open-ended, to put it simply.

If you want marketing sense, the wisest move would probably be adapting the War of the Last Alliance against Sauron, as everyone remembers the opening scene of the trilogy, which recounts the last battle of that War and Isildur keeps reocurring as a Posthumous Character. Granted, in that case the problem becomes a massive Foregone Conclusion, but that'll be the case in any choice, because I'm fairly certain everyone knows the story beats of the LOTR trilogy, particularly Boromir's death and Gandalf's resurrection, for instance. The only story beat most people don't know (due it being Adapted Out) is the Scouring of the Shire.

A sequel to LOTR may be too bold, but if you really wanna get crazy, adapting the The New Shadow, Tolkien's unfinished text for a LOTR sequel set after Sauron's fall, would be pretty insane

edited 7th Nov '17 8:51:56 AM by Gaon

They oughta do a show about the Blue Wizards.

I favor the theory Alatar and Pallando both fell and started dark sorcery cults in the East, and that's how the Easterlings joined with Sauron in the War of the Ring, by their influence (like Saruman dragged a shitload of Dunlendings to Sauron's cause).

There's a mention that the Easterling host that invaded The Lonely Mountain was commanded by the "Easterling Emperors", and I believe those Emperors were Alatar and Pallando in person, commanding the hosts.

Amazon confirms its commitment to a multi-season LOTR tv show.

Someone request the mods to change the thread topic to Amazon's Lord of the Rings or something.

edited 13th Nov '17 10:39:06 AM by Gaon

Thread title changed per request.

Did Christopher Tolkein die? I thought he hated the films, why agree to a series?

Christopher's still alive and kicking (just this year he released Beren and Luthíen), but he's 92'.

It's been often speculated that due his advanced age, he may have passed on the Tolkien estate leadership to Simon Tolkien, his son, who's a lot more open to the movies and daptations than his father (to the point he was disowned once for his support of the Jackson films, though they reconciled).

Another possiblity is that Amazon studios may have made substantiative promises or agreements to please Christopher.

The fact they are focusing on "unexplored" events before LOTR suggests it may be at least partially a Silmarillion adaptation. There may be hope.

I know it would be almost impossible to do right but I really want this to be a Silmarillion adaptation. If it's not I'm not sure what the point of it would be.

I thought it was going to be an adaptation of The Silmarillion and the LOTR name is for posterity.

So far, prequel series - check. Previously unexplored stories could mean anything at this point, so there's not enough evidence of it being a prime-grime drama yet. I still expect a lot more scenes of random squabbling at the Rivendell and Gondor halls, rather than battles and adventurous quests across the greater Middle Earth. It's not even a matter of budget - a lot of the books consists of people simply telling tales about the olden days, which then serve to enhance the current action. So if the show does go for the trendy dark and political approach, it's just willfully ignoring the very essence of its source material - the mythopoeia.

Christopher Tolkien resigns as head of the Tolkien Estate.

Well, that basically spells it out that the rights of the Silmarillion are fair game now.

You'd think they'd take more time than that to start collaborating with other studios.

I wonder who the new head is.

It looks like the current head of the estate is Priscilla Tolkien, J.R.R Tolkien's last child and only daughter. Out of Tolkien's sons, the only remaining ones are Christopher Tolkien (who's 92 and just retired) and Priscilla (who's 87).

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about her:

This whole thing suddenly got a lot more interesting. The Silmarillion is still a long shot but it's now an actual possibility.

Apparently they've announced a budget of 100 million per season, so that's also raising my hopes.

If there ever were to be an adaptation of The Silmarillion, a show would work better than a movie. It even has a built in intro sequence.