Rings of Power
Last night, Amazon premiered the first two episodes of its too-big-to-fail fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Budget estimates for the first season range between $750 million and $1 billion, the most anyone has ever spent on a TV production, even with as grand as things have gotten with the final seasons of Game of Thrones.
The good news is, you can see every dollar spent in the show itself. Quite frankly, there has been nothing like this one TV before, not at this scale, and the first two episodes demonstrated that this really is going to be akin to an eight hour, blockbuster level Lord of the Rings movie. It is absolutely on par, production value-wise, with Peter Jackson’s original trilogy, though whether it’s as good remains to be seen, and we’ll have to see how the remaining six episodes go. But again, Amazon is planning to have this run for years, as a lot of the investment here was in costumes and sets and FX they want to use for a long while to come.
It’s a gorgeous show, which includes everything from the brilliant elfin cities to the individual practical effects on the Orcs. I remember most of the previews describing it as “breathtaking,” and it’s an appropriate description. There is nothing else like this on TV because frankly, no one else can afford it. Even a megacorp like Disney still seems to futz the budget when it comes to productions like Obi-Wan Kenobi, accused of looking soundstage cheap, or She-Hulk, with its sometimes unfinished CG effects. Here, Amazon was having none of that. It all must look flawless, like you could be seeing this in theaters expecting a $100M box office weekend. And they have spent enough to make that happen.
Rings of Power
The controversies surrounding the show about women characters and black Harfoots and elves are…extremely stupid, once you see it in practice. There is literally nothing that lessens the enjoyment of the world of Lord of the Rings because there are suddenly more women and actors of color, compared to the White Guy brigade of Legolas, Aragorn, Gandalf, Gimli and four hobbits of the first film. One of the things I appreciate about the cast, other than the diversity, is the fact that I don’t know any of these actors, which is somehow refreshing, and reminds me of season 1 of Game of Thrones when the only person I knew there, ironically, was Lord of the Ring’s Sean Bean.
I would say it will take more than money to make Rings of Power a hit, but at baseline, I’m not even sure that’s true. They have spent so much cash making a blockbuster-level Lord of the Rings experience here that you are simply not going to want to miss it. If it was outrageously terrible, despite the budget, that would be a problem, but so far it isn’t. It’s pretty good, as a bonus, and hopefully someday we get to full-on “great,” even if we’re never hitting the extremely high target of the original trilogy.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.