How The Rings of Power Is Hoping To Equal The Lord Of The Rings Movies
Can they compare?
We’re less than two weeks away from the premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video, but now it turns out Amazon wants the show to be just a little bit more like the films adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s work that were helmed by Peter Jackson. While most of us won’t watch the series until next Friday, September 2, eager fans will get to watch the the first two hours of the first season a few days earlier. The Rings of Power is getting its own theatrical release.
Deadline reports that the first two episodes of The Rings of Power will be screened at Cinemark theaters for only one night — next Wednesday, August 31, two days before the episodes stream on Amazon Prime Video. The event is a global one, with Cinemark theaters and its brands all over selling tickets to the premiere. If nothing else, we can expect spoilers all over the place between next Wednesday and Friday, so any fans hoping to catch the streaming premiere should be careful surfing next week.
The fact that the first two The Rings of Power episodes will hit movie screens may very well be one of the only things it ultimately has in common with Peter Jackson’s adaptations. As ScreenRant explained, part of Amazon’s deal with the Tolkien estate insists that The Rings of Power cannot be considered a direct prequel to Jackson’s films. That’s why as much as fans might beg for it, you won’t see Ian McKellen making a cameo as Gandalf. You won’t see Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel morph into Cate Blanchett or Robert Aramayo’s Elrond somehow transform into Hugo Weaving.
In fact, the deal with the Tolkien estate could have something to do with why The Rings of Power allegedly ghosted Peter Jackson. Not that long ago, Jackson said the show’s production team had reached out to him to gauge his interest in being involved with the show. Jackson claimed he told them he’d need to see scripts first, and that he never heard back. This is only speculation, but since Amazon is contractually obligated to make sure The Rings of Power isn’t a direct prequel to Jackson’s films, it isn’t tough to imagine the streamer’s legal team losing their minds if/when they heard the show was talking to Jackson.
Again, that’s just speculation, but we know for sure some people have been losing their minds over The Rings of Power. Without any of them seeing any of the series so far, Tolkien fans have proven divisive over its imminent existence, sometimes to an absolutely fevered evangelical pitch. There were certainly fans airing their grievances during the release of Jackson’s trilogy, but nothing quite like what we’ve seen in the lead-up to the Amazon series. In one example, a group of fans petitioned Harper Collins to stop using The Rings of Power promotional art on editions of Tolkien’s books; a fairly standard practice from which they feel Tolkien’s work is somehow exempt. One major difference between this and any fan grievances aired during Jackson’s adaptations seems to be the objection to people of color being cast in the roles of Elves and Dwarves in the new series. Apparently some fans are offended by real people playing imaginary people, if those real people don’t look exactly like the imaginary people (at least, not as they imagined them) in question. They’re going to blow some serious gaskets when they hear about cosplaying.
