Friday at Comic-Con in San Diego, people got a sneak peek at the new “Lord of the Rings” series “The Rings of Power.” A new trailer for the show, which takes place thousands of years before “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” was released by Amazon Studios. Stephen Colbert, who says he likes Tolkien, was also there to lead a panel about the series on Hall H, the biggest stage at the fan convention.
“Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is led by showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, who focus on Tolkien’s “Second Age of Middle-earth,” when kingdoms are rising and falling and evil forces threaten to cover the world in darkness.
“The Rings of Power” will take viewers to places like the Elven realms of Lindon and Eregion, the Dwarven realm of Khazad-dûm, the Southlands, the Northernmost Wastes, the Sundering Seas, and the island kingdom of Nmenór. They will also meet a large cast, including Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker).
The eight-part series will start on Prime Video on September 2, and each week after that, a new episode will be added. It is said to have cost $465 million, making it the most expensive movie ever made. In 2017, Amazon paid $250 million to the Tolkien family for the rights.
Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter last year that the number is a “crazy headline that’s fun to click on,” but it’s also “really building the infrastructure of what will support the whole series,” which she called a “huge, world-building show.”
Salke also said that a “huge, worldwide audience needs to make an appointment to watch it,” but they were “pretty confident” that would happen.
This week, the fan convention started at the San Diego Convention Center. It hasn’t been this big since 2019, and many studios spent a lot of money to promote upcoming movies and TV shows. Comic-Con is going on until Sunday.
