All eyes on Amazon Prime as ‘Lord of the Rings’ prequel set to premiere

Christopher Tolkien once said his father JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was “unfilmable.” The mammoth success of the subsequent movies aside, Amazon will take it a notch higher on Thursday.

The Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon Prime Video service will on Thursday release “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” an eight-episode season mounted on a jaw-dropping budget of $715 million.

It is the most expensive season on television ever made, almost three times the price Amazon paid for buying the television rights to the original trilogy in 2017. The budget of the 50-hour series is equivalent to 0.15% of Amazon’s 2021 revenues and about a fifth of what New Zealand, where the series has been filmed, allocated for its defense budget this year.

No points for guessing that Amazon is betting that this prequel series, based on the historical footnotes released at the conclusion of book three, will be its first megahit.

Although Prime Video has delivered hit shows like “The Boys,” and “The Wheel of Time,” it has never really tasted global success like rival Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” or Disney’s “The Mandalorian.”

Time will tell if this is the one for Amazon—9 pm today, to be precise.