Only 37% of U.S. viewers watched The Rings of Power all the way through

It has become a bit of a cliché to crap on The Rings of Power, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel series. Lord of the Rings fans were mixed on it at best; Amazon spent a historically huge amount of money on this show, so a lot of folk wondered why it turned out so…meh. You can certainly see the money onscreen, but there were times during the first season when it felt like Amazon was gesturing to the greatness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original story and hoping that would cover for the fact that they didn’t have much new to add.

Anyway, in the grand spirit of taking easy shots at The Rings of Power, The Hollywood Reporter has it that only 37% of people in the U.S. watched the first season of the series all the way through to the finish. In Europe that number was higher at 45%.

So how bad are those numbers? Are they bad at all? Since we don’t have any metrics to compare them to — streamers will sometimes release the number of hours a program has been viewed, but rarely the completion rate — it’s hard to tell. But less than half of folks getting through the first season doesn’t sound spectacular, and according to insiders, a completion rate of 50% would have been considered “a solid but not spectacular result.”

Fire breaks out near the set of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Let’s see, how else can we make The Rings of Power look bad? Well, Variety reports that a fire broke out in a warehouse on the perimeter of the backlot at Bray Studios in Windsor, England, where season 2 of the show is being filmed. Filming was shut down for one hour and then resumed. No one had to evacuate.

All in all, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, definitely not as big as the news about the low completion rate. But honestly, it feels like no matter what The Rings of Power does, it’s kind of hard for it to get good press.  Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke wants to push back against that narrative. “This desire to paint the show as anything less than a success — it’s not reflective of any conversation I’m having internally,” she said.

Salke also teased how the second season will have a more dramatic story. “That’s a huge opportunity for us. The first season required a lot of setting up.” Expect new episodes sometime in 2024.

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