If Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were made today, Dominic Monaghan (Merry Brandybuck) thinks they’d be a streaming series.
The Lord of the Rings is back in the conversation, mainly thanks to Amazon’s very expensive prequel series The Rings of Power, which is due to premiere in September. The last time The Lord of the Rings was a cultural force was probably in the early 2000s when Peter Jackson was releasing his movie adaptations. (I dunno if The Hobbit movies made quite the same impact.) Naturally, fans are curious to hear what the cast members from those films think of the revival.
As it ends up, they’re down. “I think it’s fine!” actor Dominic Monaghan (Merry Brandybuck) told ComicBookMovie. “That’s where the whole way we get our content is going.”
"I think if you tried to make the Peter Jackson series of films now with some of them pushing into three hours and twenty minutes for the extended editions, people would say, ‘We can’t do that. We don’t have the bandwidth.’ Nowadays, I think people want slightly more bitesize chunks of their content. I’m the same! It’s great to watch creatives handle that world in a different way and I wish them luck with it."
I think if someone tried to make the Peter Jackson movies today, the studio would suggest turning them into a TV show very early in the process, not so much because people now like their content in bite-sized chunks but because there’s more money in streaming than movies at the moment. But that’s just speculation; there is an animated Lord of the Rings movie in production, as it happens, although it’s not getting as much buzz as the series.
I wonder if Amazon will feature Monaghan or any of his fellow castmates in walk-on roles in The Rings of Power. We’ll find out when the series premieres on September 2.
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