TOPLINE
Amazon Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, attracted more than 25 million viewers worldwide on its first day, Amazon announced Saturday, making it the streaming platform’s biggest premiere ever.
KEY FACTS
Amazon premiered the first two episodes of the epic fantasy series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing in more than 240 countries and territories Friday.
The highly anticipated eight-episode season is scheduled to run until October 14.
The release of the Lord of the Rings spinoff comes less than two weeks after HBO Max’s House of the Dragon, the prequel series to Game of Thrones, set an HBO record for a premiere with nearly 10 million Americans watching, only to outdo itself last week when it pulled in 10.2 million viewers in the U.S., according to IndieWire, which used data from Nielsen and first-party data.
BIG NUMBER
$715 million. That’s how much the series is estimated to have cost to produce, the Wall Street Journal reported, with some budget estimatesranging between $750 million and $1 billion, which would make it the most a production company has spent on a TV series.
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KEY BACKGROUND
It’s been 19 years since the premiere of director Peter Jackson’s final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, which grossed more than $378 million in the United States and Canada, including $72 million on opening weekend, according to IMDb. Worldwide, it grossed $1.1 billion, slightly higher than the final movie in the Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), which made $962 million worldwide and $255 million in the U.S. and Canada alone. Amazon Prime Video paid$250 million for the adaptation and production rights from Tolkien’s estate in 2017, committing to five seasons.
FURTHER READING
Amazon’s ‘The Rings Of Power’ Certainly Looks Like A Billion Dollars, At Least (Forbes)
By Brian Bushard, Forbes Staff
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