New Details On Amazon’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series

The details behind the scenes of Amazon’s Lord of The Rings TV series is starting to sound like more of an epic drama than the source material. It started with Amazon beating out Netflix for the TV rights to the franchise with a whopping $250 million bid. Add to that the fact that they’ve set an initial budget for the series at $500 million, with some estimates have it costing Amazon as much as a billion dollars to make it happen. The result, as it now is being reported, is that we’ll be getting a five-season series with the potential for at least one spin-off.

We still have no idea about the story for the film, but we know it will be in the same cinematic world that was created by Peter Jackson. In fact, the deal for the franchise rights includes the ability to use clips from the films if needed for flashbacks.

THR has also got some news on whether Peter Jackson would be involved in the production of the series.
As for whether [Peter] Jackson is involved in the TV series as an executive producer remains to be seen and would be up to him. His attorney Peter Nelson was not a part of the 2017 rights negotiations but recently helped start a dialogue between Jackson and Amazon.”It’s very much a creature of the times,” Nelson says of the Amazon deal. “We are in an era where streamers are bidding up the price of programming. I think Amazon is taking a page out of the studios’ emphasis on franchises. They also are realizing that with the overproduction of television, you need to get the eyeballs to the screen, and you can do that with franchise titles.”

I’m very curious to see what sort of story they come up with for the new series and how it meshes with the original films and books. I’m also very interested to see which, if any, of the original film characters, may appear. We’ll know sooner than later because it turns out that one of the caveats of the contract was that they’ve got to start shooting the show within two years or they lose the rights.

Source: THR