The new “Lord of the Rings” series “The Rings of Power” debuted to Comic-Con attendees on Friday in San Diego. A new trailer for the programme, which takes place tens of thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” was released by Amazon Studios. The main stage at the fan conference, Hall H, featured a panel promoting the series that was moderated by self-described Tolkien enthusiast Stephen Colbert.
“Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” centres on Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth, when kingdoms are building and falling and evil forces loom and threaten to engulf the globe in darkness. The show is directed by executive producers and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay.
“The Rings of Power” will introduce viewers to a large cast, including Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and High King Gil-galad, and transport them to fantastical settings such as the Elven realms of Lindon and Eregion, the Dwarven realm Khazad-dûm, the Southlands, the Northernmost Wastes, the Sundering Seas, and the island kingdom of Nmenór (Benjamin Walker).
New episodes of the eight-part series will be released each week beginning on September 2 on Prime Video. It is reported to have cost $465 million, making it the most costly movie ever made. The Tolkien estate sold the rights to Amazon in 2017 for $250 million.
While the figure is a “crazy headline that’s fun to click on,” Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke said last year that “that is really building the infrastructure of what will sustain the whole series” which she called a “huge, world-building show.”
Salke added that they were “pretty confident that will happen” despite the fact that a “giant, global audience needs to show up to it as appointment television.”
For the first time since 2019, the fan convention began this week at the San Diego Convention Center, and several studios spent a lot of money promoting new movies and television shows. The Comic-Con is open till Sunday.