What Can Amazon Do With Lord of the Rings?
Amazon owns arguably the smallest slice of the Middle-earth pie. Not all the TV rights to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit went to Saul Zaentz in the ‘70s—the rights Middle-earth Enterprise granted, and that are now in the hands of Embracer Group, cover series that are told serially in upwards of four parts. In 2017, Amazon negotiated directly with the Tolkien Estate for the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit adaptations for series that run longer than that, securing them for $250 million. Five years later, that deal gave us The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel series set during the Second Age of Tolkien’s Middle-earth chronology, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, charting the return of the Dark Lord Sauron and the creation of the titular rings.
These rights also specifically relate to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit—giving Rings of Power access to names and events referenced in those works, so characters like Elrond, Galadriel, and more can appear—which means Rings of Power cannot directly adapt events that Tolkien specifically laid out in books like The Silmarillion or The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Instead, it’s been forced to create its own version of those events, inferring points and details Tolkien referred to in Lord of the Rings and its appendices, as well as The Hobbit.
