'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' Season 2 Trailer Rings in a New War
When the history of prestige TV and the rise of streaming is written, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will have an entire entry to itself. The deal for Amazon's Prime Video to make the series was negotiated by Jeff Bezos, with two seasons contractually greenlit from the get-go as part of securing the rights and $250 million paid before a single person was hired to work on it. There was one catch: Amazon Studios was allowed to make a series based on Middle Earth; however, they could not use a single bit of Tolkien's writing that had been previously adapted, which is to say, just about all of it. Despite Bezos agreeing to such ludicrous terms that a real Hollywood producer would have laughed out of the room, Amazon Studios has managed to produce two seasons of generally watchable television; it only cost $1 Billion American Dollars by the time they were done.
With such a history behind it, it seems extraordinarily doubtful that Amazon Studios will be willing to continue the series once the two seasons it was forced to agree to, no matter how terrible the finished project turned out to be or how few people tuned in. Prime Video has attempted to hype the series as one of its most-watched ever. However, a closer look at the numbers uncovered showed that very few of those who watched the premiere episode of Season 1 continued with the series. It also basically failed at the awards game, with only six Emmy nominations for Season 1 (and all of them in the much-less-watched Creative Emmys category), one nomination at the SAG-AFTRA awards, and a complete snub by the Golden Globes. In short, even though the series is the best version that could have been made under the constraints (not to mention the pandemic lockdown delays), The Rings of Power has been a personal embarrassment for Bezos.
Optimists may hope the show gets further seasons simply because it has managed to be far better than it probably had any right to be. However, one look at the final trailer for Season 2 and it's evident that this season is chock full of all the payoff scenes that a prequel set in this era of Tolkien's histories would expect, a clear sign the production is functioning under the assumption this is all the episodes they'll have to work with, and that the Season 2 finale will almost certainly need to be a series finale as well.
