Amazon is famously spending a heart-stopping amount of money to make a Lord of the Rings TV show, but given how big a footprint a show like that must have, we’ve heard surprisingly little about it, except that it’s set in the Second Age of Middle-earth and that it may have nudity.
Well, we have a bunch of new information today courtesy of “Spy Reports” gathered by TheOneRing.net. It’s probably best to take these with a grain of salt — we won’t know for sure what’s happening until Amazon itself gets a little more open-handed with information — but TheOneRing.net is a pretty reliable resource; they’ve been covering The Lord of the Rings for a long time and they’ve gotten very good at it.
So without further ado, let’s pull back the curtain. But be warned: there are potential SPOILERS beyond this point.
Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show will adapt The Silmarillion
One of the biggest takeaways from the report is that Amazon has the licensing rights to parts of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, works that deal mainly with the distant past of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented world. Since this show is set during the Second Age, thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings story proper, it would make sense that Amazon would want to adapt the relevant parts of those books. And apparently it’s doing so with the full approval and cooperation of the Tolkien estate, which is more involved with this production than on other adaptations of Tolkien’s work. There were three lore experts/Tolkien scholars on set.
Here are some more details:
- Men, Elves and Dwarves have their own production units.
- They’re doing that thing they did on Game of Thrones where they film fake location scenes to throw off the press. Seems like a waste of money if you ask me, but I guess Amazon has plenty to burn.
- The Lord of the Rings show is sharing some crew with The Wheel of Time show, Amazon’s other big fantasy series that’s due out by the end of the year.
- We’ll meet some early halflings/hobbits. Some will be darker skinned, which lines up with Tolkien’s description of Harfoots in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings; “they were browner of skin” and “moved westward early.”
- Celebrimbor, an important Elven character who forged rings of power in the Second Age, has been recast.
- There is nudity in the show, but it’s not sexualized. Instead, TheOneRing.net suggests that there will be “concentration camp-type visuals” involving Elves being corrupted and turned into Orcs.
- Sauron, who in the Second Age sometimes presented himself as a beautiful creature named Annatar, will not be in the first season of the show, but he’s a big part of this story so you know he’s going to show up eventually.
And finally, TheOneRing.net has it that the show is being set up for a mid-2022 debut. It’ll be here before you know it.
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