Amazon partnering up to do “The Lord of the Rings” television series

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Amazon Studies announce "LotR" television series
Amazon Studies announce "LotR" television series

In a press release on Monday, November 13th, 2017 Amazon has confirmed it will be teaming up with “the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins and New Line Cinema” to produce a multi seasons series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s bestseller “The Lord of the Rings” and it will be set before the events shown in “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

The news were broken first via Businesswire to a worldwide audience obviously looking forward to what might be the heir to the incredibly successful “Game of Thrones” series on HBO. According to a news report by the Telegraph Jeff Bezos himself seems to have been involved in a bidding war which HBO couldn’t win and Netflix couldn’t, either. It seems clear that Amazon is trying to push its streaming services on films and television series which until now never provided the amount of quality produced series as HBO and Netflix had done in recent years.

The fact that the press release explicitly mentioned the Tolkien Estate and Trust, which means the Tolkien family, and does give a time frame for the stories as well as a “multi season commitment” we can now look forward to years of Middle-earth related stories on Amazon. Having it set before “The Fellowship of the Ring” opens up the opportunity to show Aragorn’s many years of toil, the developments after “The Hobbit” at Erebor or the Misty Mountains and so on – as I have mentioned in another blog post Tolkien was “The Lord of the Gaps” and these can now be filled.

“The Lord of the Rings is a cultural phenomenon that has captured the imagination of generations of fans through literature and the big screen,” said Sharon Tal Yguado, Head of Scripted Series, Amazon Studios. “We are honored to be working with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins and New Line on this exciting collaboration for television and are thrilled to be taking The Lord of the Rings fans on a new epic journey in Middle Earth.”

P.S. And yes, I am also looking forward to the day companies like Amazon can spell “Middle-earth” right 😉

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Marcel R. Bülles

Marcel R. Bülles is the author of thetolkienist.com, a specialist blog centering on worldwide Tolkien fandom, geekdom and research. He works as a freelance translator, journalist and writer and is the founder of the German Tolkien Society as well as a co-founder to RingCon, Europe's formerly biggest fantasy film convention. You can find him in cafés all over the world sipping an espresso blogging, writing, reading. At one point he was married to an extremely lovely French lady by the nickname of Sauron. Yes, that Sauron. He is also active with the International Tolkien Fellowship on Facebook and the Tolkien Folk on Instagram.