The Lord of the Rings shows Amazon declined to make (to our relief)

Amazon hopes that it’s found one Lord of the Rings show to rule them all: The Rings of Power, a fabulously expensive show that will detail the events of the Second Age of Middle-earth. But as it turns out, the studio was actually pitched a number of other Lord of the Rings spinoff ideas before they settled on the one we’re actually going to get.

Speaking to Total Film, The Rings of Power co-showrunner J.D. Payne recalled how he and his showrunning partner Patrick McKay landed the gig to recreate Middle-earth.

"When we first went up for the job, we were told there were literally dozens of other people who were also throwing their hat in the ring, and everyone was coming in with different things. Amazon bought the rights to the trilogy, the appendices, and The Hobbit. They said the field was wide open — any story within that material, you could tell. So you had people pitching the Young Aragon show, or the Gimli spinoff, or other kinds of things."

Now, Payne could just be spitballing here, but we’re going to take this literally and assume that the “Young Aragorn” show and Gimli show were actually pitched to Amazon, and the studio decided to pass on them to all of our benefit. Not saying I wouldn’t want to see Aragorn ranger around in his early days, but the idea of trying to do that as a worthy successor to something like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings is akin to madness. For all my worries about The Rings of Power, there’s little doubt it was a better choice than trying to depict the smaller-scale adventures of the characters from the original story. There’s just way too many ways that could go wrong.

Amazon may have more rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s works than we thought

The other big thing to pull out of Payne’s quote is that he says Amazon “bought the rights to the trilogy, the appendices, and The Hobbit.”

This is interesting, because up until now it’s been widely believed and reported that Amazon only had the rights to Tolkien’s appendices, which are attached to the back of Return of the King. But Payne’s saying Amazon has the actual rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as well. Meanwhile, New Line Cinema is releasing an animated movie about the early days of Rohan titled The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in 2024, and there was a whole rights kerfluffle a while back where the film rights for The Lord of the Rings were under dispute…so how does Amazon factor into all that?

We know is that Amazon was able to secure the rights to make their new television series from the Tolkien estate directly; whatever they got was not part of rights package being warred over by New Line Cinema and the Saul Zaentz Company, which licenses out the right to make a wide range of Lord of the Rings properties, from movies to games to theme parks.

Hopefully we’ll find out more details in the future. From what Payne is saying here, it sounds like the streamer could have access to more stories than we originally thought. We’ll find out more when The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Prime Video on September 2.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels

h/t Slash Film