Amazon’s Lord of the Rings television series hasn’t aired a single episode, but Amazon is confident in what they have. The studio renewed the series for a second season.
The project isn’t even fully cast yet, with Markella Kavenagh, Will Poulter, and Joseph Mawle already signed on to star. The series will shoot in New Zealand.
Writers JD Payne and Patrick McKay are the series showrunners. J.A. Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) will direct a few episodes, and Bryan Cogman (Game of Thrones) is a consulting producer on the project.
Amazon picked the show up with a two-season contract, but the second season wasn’t official until this week.
The series remains something of a mystery, outside of the news that it explores new storylines in Middle Earth. Rumors indicate the series will focus on Middle Earth‘s Second Age, set hundreds of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
The Second Age was the time of the creation of Sauron’s One Ring and the Rings of Power. Amazon Studios, the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema serve as producers on the series.
[Deadline]
If the series takes even the slightest bit from the films, it will win fans over. Although the films weren’t perfect, Peter Jackson handled them beautifully.
I wonder if the studio plans to use exact locations that Jackson shot at to give fans an earlier look at the same settings from the films.
