The Wheel of Time should’ve gotten The Rings of Power’s huge budget

In the land of Mordor, where (J.R.R. Tolkien’s) shadows lie

Following the massive success of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made no secret of the fact that he was eager to find the next big fantasy show. He wasn’t alone in this; many studios have tried to capitalize on the recent genre television boom. But Amazon’s case is interesting because The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time represent two opposite approaches to this quest.

The Rings of Power has the enormous advantage of being set in a well-established and widely beloved fantasy world. Tolkien was the grandfather of the genre, and his work has influenced just about everything that has come after to some extent. It’s easy to imagine the board room conversations: “What’s bigger than Game of Thrones? The Lord of the Rings! Let’s make that one!”

If we try to think about this like an Amazon executive, something set in The Lord of the Rings universe would surely seem like the safer bet over a show based on a series of books that, while popular, have never been tested onscreen. There’s already a proven market for The Lord of the Rings in film, with millions upon millions of fans around the globe who love the movies created by Peter Jackson. It’s an enormous risk to invest nearly a billion dollars in any series, but doing it for a show like The Rings of Power would seem to guarantee more of a return on investment. More people would show up for your premiere, anyway.

On the other hand, The Rings of Power will forever be living in the shadow of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Yes, it can be its own great thing, but the comparison is there and easy to make. Creating a successful spinoff or prequel series is challenging because finding a way to step out from the shadow of a hugely successful thing that came before is hard. HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon has done it by leaning into its own strengths, as well emphasizing both its similarities and differences from the mothership series, such as its ambitious time jumps.

The Rings of Power, by contrast, is trying to tell a story that feels similar enough to The Lord of the Rings to captivate fans of Middle-earth without straying too far afield of what came before. It hasn’t truly distinguished itself in terms of tone, storytelling, or style. The Lord of the Rings remains a cultural touchstone for fantasy series. The Hobbit movies were divisive, but the story itself is still massively influential. Expecting The Rings of Power to become the next television fantasy phenomenon is like hoping lightning will strike not twice, but three times in the same place.

The Wheel of Time is Amazon’s most important fantasy show

On the flip side, we have The Wheel of Time. The books have their own legions of fans, and while they don’t number as many as Tolkien’s they’re still formidable. It’s a series that has never been adapted to film before (no, I don’t count The Winter Dragon), which means there is no shadow for it to step out from. Yes, it will be compared to other fantasy shows, but it won’t be competing against itself.

There’s an adage that I think is relevant here, which is that writers have “one great story to tell.” I don’t one hundred percent buy into this; there are plenty of writers telling lots of great stories over the course of their career, but in the context of enormous fantasy series, it’s worth examining. When someone like J.R.R. Tolkien spends decades of his life fleshing out Middle-earth, it’s not much of a stretch to say that that is the great story of his lifetime. And the part of his legendarium he felt like writing the least about is the Second Age, which is what Amazon is attempting to make a mega-hit.

But The Wheel of Time is another author’s “great story.” Robert Jordan spent a huge part of his life working on the series. It’s one of a handful of fantasy book series that stands in the same legendary pantheon as A Song of Ice and Fire and The Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea. While The Rings of Power represents Amazon trying to tap into a franchise they know works on film, The Wheel of Time is a true gamble. There are so many ways it could go wrong, but if the streamer manages to pull off the entire tale successfully, it stands to have far more of an impact than another Lord of the Rings story.

Instead of asking lightning to strike in the same place over and over, The Wheel of Time represents a whole new lightning rod. It might make less sense in a board room, but it makes more from a storytelling perspective.

The Wheel of Time needs more resources to reach its full potential

There’s one last reason Amazon should be investing more in The Wheel of Time over The Rings of Power, and that’s that The Wheel of Time actually needs the resources more. Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins asked Amazon for 10-episode seasons and was turned down, and while some of the show’s set pieces haven’t quite knocked it out of the park, others have been excellent. The show’s visuals aren’t as even as those on The Rings of Power, and I would bet that at least some of that comes down to budget. The Wheel of Time has the potential to become even better if Amazon puts more money into it.

The Rings of Power, by contrast, has reached a point where I think the diminishing returns of its nigh-infinite budget are becoming apparent. It is gorgeous to behold…but all that money isn’t making the story any better. It’s fascinating, because in so many ways the presentation of The Rings of Power is flawless, but in others it’s falling short. What The Rings of Power needs is not more money, but more creative solutions. There are other shows out there that are just as beautiful as The Rings of Power: Hulu’s The Orville: New Horizons, House of the Dragon, and Netflix’s The Witcher and season 4 of Stranger Things are all comparable. Yet those shows were made on a fraction of the budget of The Rings of Power, and still succeeded.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is proving that tons of money alone does not a great show make. But if you have tons of money, you might as well put it into a show with the potential to give you the most bang for your buck. The great irony is that in its search for the “next Game of Thrones,” Amazon may be overlooking the very clear contender already in its stable.

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