It’s become kind of easy to take shots at Amazon’s show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Jeff Bezos spent a historic amount of money on this thing, and while it’s not a terrible series, it didn’t set the world on fire quite like Amazon wanted to to, whelming critics and audiences in huge numbers.
Viewership numbers tend to track this impression. According to a new analysis from Variety, people spent around 1% fewer minutes watching the show with each passing week. The biggest drop-off came after the first two episodes, which were released together. There was a decline of 20% after that, suggesting that a lot of people watched those premiere episodes and decided not to continue.
Variety sees this as a bad sign for The Rings of Power, which is shooting its second season as we speak. But there are other numbers. The latest ratings numbers from Nielsen, for example, only cover everything through the seventh and penultimate episode of the show, “The Eye.” The week that episode came out, The Rings of Power was watched for 988 million minutes, which is a lot of minutes. It came in second place on the streaming charts that week, behind only Netflix’s Dahmer, which was watched for a staggered 2.4 billion minutes.
Don’t throw in the towel on The Rings of Power just yet
We’ll see what viewership looks like for the finale, which traditionally comes with an uptick; according to Parrot Analytics, there was a burst in demand for the show after the final episode, although we’ll note that “demand” is different from “ratings”; we don’t have firm numbers for that week yet.
And it’s also true that The Rings of Power is the most successful show in the history of Amazon. Then again, given how much money they’d spent making and marketing it, any other result would have been embarrassing.
So basically, there’s some conflicting data here. Whatever problems The Rings of Power ran into during its first season, it’s too early to write it off as a lost cause. We’ll see what the show does with its second season sometime in 2024.
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h/t CBR