ROB LONG: The Lord of Leftovers.
Amazon Studios had a problem. It wasn’t money, of course. Amazon Studios’ parent company (and for that matter its actual parent, Jeff Bezos) has, to use a technical term, money out the yin yang. What Amazon needed was intellectual property with major nerd appeal. HBO has Game of Thrones, which is already being multiplexed into a Game of Thrones Cinematic Universe—a GOTCU, if you will—and Netflix has a reliable competitor in its Stranger Things series. They set their sights on The Lord of the Rings.
There’s a huge amount of published work by J.R.R. Tolkien—novels, maps, songs—and an even larger amount of unpublished material controlled by the Tolkien estate. Then there are the Peter Jackson–helmed movies, which together add up to about 47 hours of motion-picture content. (Could be less, but they sure seemed long to me…) All of that material is under the control of the Tolkien estate, which is run by the author’s heirs, who have tenaciously guarded the creative and subsidiary rights to their forbear’s body of work.
They’re not nuts, though. When Amazon offered $250 million for the rights to certain parts of the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe, they struck a deal. But the deal is as complicated and Byzantine as the endpaper maps on my (mostly unread) edition of The Lord of the Rings. Amazon Studios has the rights to produce a film version of the events in the appendices of the novels but is mostly restricted to those and whatever pieces of the unpublished material the estate wishes to share. The series, which premieres in September 2022 and will cost more than $1 billion to complete, has to stick to that material and the events of something called The Second Age, which takes the idea of “nerd appeal” to a new level of intensity.
Which is to say: The studio committed $1 billion to buy the rights to the bits and pieces of the story around the bigger, more well-known story. They spent $1 billion dollars for four very expensive words. Not exactly a leftover pickle and mustard sandwich.
So how is that working out for them? Impressive: Amazon’s $1-billion LOTR flop currently has a lower audience approval than Joseph R. Biden.
If you aren’t aware, the Tolkien fandom isn’t happy with Amazon’s new work of “art,” the $1-billion-a-season “Rings of Power.”
There are a lot of reasons why the show is being criticized so heavily – most of them having to do with post-modern, feminist, Marxist ideology that the showrunners are trying to impose on a franchise that is utterly opposed to such things – but I’ll let you sift through those in-depth reviews for yourself.
As for right now, let’s just glory in the fact that somehow, despite the beloved franchise having oodles of source material to work with, the creators of this hot garbage managed to get a worse initial rating than the current approval ratings of the most unliked President of the United States.
If you’d like an in-depth look at (some of) what went wrong, YouTuber “The Critical Drinker” (aka Scottish novelist William Jordan) has you covered: