Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series ghosted Peter Jackson
By Daniel Roman
Soon we’ll be returning to Middle-earth, and filmmaker Peter Jackson will be right there with us in the cheap seats. The director of both The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy that followed, there’s perhaps no one working in film who has more experience with the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien than Jackson. When Amazon’s highly-anticipated The Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power was first announced, one question on a lot of fans’ minds was whether Jackson would be involved in some way.
As we know by now, the answer is ‘no.’ Peter Jackson has had no hand in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. But as it turns out, Jackson almost was involved…until he got ghosted by the production.
“They asked me if I wanted to be involved — [writer-producer Fran Walsh] and I — and I said, ‘That’s an impossible question to answer without seeing a script,’” Jackson recalled on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. “So they said, ‘As soon as we get the first couple scripts, we’ll send them to you.’ And the scripts never showed up. That’s the last thing I heard, which is fine. No complaints at all.”
Fortunately, Jackson’s not the type to get salty about being blown off in such a manner. “I’ll be watching it,” he said. “I’m not the sort of guy who wishes ill will. Filmmaking is hard enough. If somebody makes a good film or TV show, it’s something to celebrate. The one thing I am looking forward to is actually seeing it as a perfectly neutral viewer.”
It sounds like Jackson is pretty intrigued about The Rings of Power from a filmmaking standpoint. The director said that Amazon is “betting the farm on Tolkien,” which sounds about right considering the first season reportedly has a budget of nearly half a billion dollars.
Amazon has “the utmost respect” for Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings films
Not to be caught flat-footed, Amazon has responded to Jackson’s comments with a statement of its own. “In pursuing the rights for our show, we were obligated to keep the series distinct and separate from the films,” it reads. “We have the utmost respect for Peter Jackson and The Lord of The Rings films and are thrilled that he is looking forward to watching The Rings of Power.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter’s sources, that legal obligation for Amazon to keep its Lord of the Rings show distinct from Jackson’s movies (which are owned by New Line, a subsidiary of WarnerMedia) may have played a significant role in the decision not to follow up with Jackson. While The Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay reportedly wanted to involve Jackson in the prequel series, THR indicates that the Tolkien estate itself was against the trilogy director being looped into the project, having famously bashed The Lord of the Rings movies for lacking the “beauty and seriousness” of the author’s novels. Also, Amazon’s head of genre programming, Sharon Tal Yguado, was a big advocate for getting Jackson to help out with The Rings of Power, but she eventually left. So it’s pretty understandable why things shook out the way they did.
But still…not even a call to let ol’ Peter Jackson know you wouldn’t be sending him the scripts? Manners befitting a Sackville-Baggins.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Prime Video on September 2.
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