By: Jacob Hartzler
“[T]elling the story of the forging on the Rings of Power is a privilege and a responsibility. I hope we do Tolkien’s work justice.” These are the words that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos relayed in an email to Time Magazine. In November of 2017, Amazon released that it had paid an eye-popping $250 million for the rights to produce TV programs based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings fantasy novels. This was the largest TV rights deal in history for a literary property and was nearly equivalent to the amount of money that New Line Cinema spent to produce all three of the Peter Jackson- directed Lord of the Rings movies. Yet the staggering price tag to acquire the rights to make such a series was just the first challenge that Amazon faces in producing the most expensive single season of a television series in history.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s span of literary works include The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. These works are protected under federal copyright protection and are held by the Tolkien Estate. In the early 2000s, Peter Jackson adapted The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King into a film trilogy. The last installment of which still shares the record for the most Oscars won in a single night. Jackson later split Tolkien’s The Hobbit into another trilogy. Together, the six movies grossed nearly six-billion dollars worldwide.
Even though The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy have already been adapted into six major motion pictures, Amazon showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, felt as though they were “sitting on a gold mine and didn’t even know it.” The duo explained that “[t]here’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to. . . As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.” This is despite the fact that the duo only has the exclusive rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and do not own the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle Earth, or any of the other works by Tolkien.
Payne and McKay theorized that they would be able to create an entire show that was based not necessarily on the books themselves but based on bits of information contained within books. In particular, the duo tapped into the appendices that appear at the end of The Return of the King. The appendices served as a prequel of sorts to the story of Frodo Baggins chronicled in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. While the events of the appendices are summarized in Jackson’s five-minute prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring, Payne and McKay theorized that there was enough information in this section to create an entire show.
The show takes place in the Second Age of Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring. Due to rights issues, however, The Rings of Power cannot brand itself as a prequel to Jackson’s films. Despite this, The Rings of Power bears a strong resemblance to Jackson’s work including the fact that both projects were largely filmed in New Zealand.
Although Bezos expressed his concern to do justice to Tolkien’s work, Payne and McKay have considerable leeway in the writing process. Therefore, fans can expect twists on what they think they know about the Lord of the Rings.
While it is still relatively early in the life of the show, the initial ratings for the show have been relatively low. The relatively low scores are generally the product of either fans saying the show strays too far away from Tolkien’s original work or that the show is not well-written or paced.
The writers for The Rings of Power are faced with the challenge of creating an original work without sacrificing the work of Tolkien, who created the world that they now look to continue. This challenge is made even more difficult by the fact that the writers must cater to an audience that is largely familiar with the works from which the writers have the rights to. One thing is certain, Amazon and other streaming services will surely monitor the success of The Rings of Power over the coming months to see whether fans react positively to the writer’s new adaptation of Tolkien’s revered works.
Has Amazon finally found its first cultural hit similar to Game of Thrones? Or has Amazon bitten off more than it can chew when it paid a record amount for the right to create a show based on works that have already been adapted into major motion pictures? Time will tell whether Amazon will be rewarded for its adaptation of Tolkien’s works or whether fans will find that Amazon overstepped its bounds by reimagining a world it did not create.
Student Bio: Jacob Hartzler is second-year law student at Suffolk University Law School. He is a staffer for the Journal of High Technology Law. Jacob received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Legal Studies and History and a Minor in Economics from Roger Williams University.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
