Amazon is spending all the money to make a show based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, adapted most famously by Peter Jackson as a trilogy of movies back in the early ’00s. But there’s a twist. According to the company’s press release, “the television adaptation will explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.” In short, it looks like the new show will be a prequel, and while there are rumors floating around about what that means, there are still lots of directions in which this series could go.
Like Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings has a ton of invented history behind it, much of it detailed in books like The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. Might Amazon’s series show us Morgoth, Sauron’s boss? Will it show us what was happening elsewhere in Middle Earth during the War of the Ring? Will we see more Hobbit feet? The possibilities are endless.
Now, we have no idea if Amazon has the rights to adapt all the stories in Tolkien’s vast mythology, but why should that get in the way of wild speculation? Here’s what Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show could and should be about: