Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series broke the record for most views at its premiere. There are 25 million global viewers in 250 countries and territories who watched the first two episodes of the show on Prime Video.
The debut of the fantasy television series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Thursday (1/9/2022) made history on the streaming platform. The story in the series is based on the classic novel The Lord of the Rings by renowned British author JRR Tolkien.
“The compatibility of Tolkien’s story, among the most popular of all time, and what many consider to be the true origins of the fantasy genre, has brought us to this proud moment,” said Amazon Studios chairman Jennifer Salke.
The series consists of eight episodes, involving showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay and executive producer Lindsey Weber. There are already production plans for a second season with a total of five seasons of the series included in Amazon’s deal with the Tolkien Estate.
Amazon acquired the rights to produce the series from the Tolkien Estate in 2017. Rings of Power is billed as the most expensive show of all time. According to Time magazine, the production cost of the first season reached 465 million US dollars (approximately Rp. 6.92 trillion).
The estimated cost for the five seasons of the series is projected to reach one billion US dollars (equivalent to Rp. 14.89 trillion). Rings of Power is set thousands of years before the events of the novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings during peacetime in Middle-earth.
Filming for the first season took place in New Zealand, where the Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed. In 2021, Amazon announced production of the second season would be moved to the UK. The second season will begin filming in October 2022.
The series actually received mostly positive reviews by critics, even having a score of 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. However, the audience score is very low, which is only 38 percent.
Amazon suspects the significant difference in ratings is the result of “review bombing.” “Review bombing” occurs when a large group of users or users with multiple accounts intentionally leave negative reviews so that the aggregate score is drastically reduced.
To address this, on Friday (2/9/2022), Amazon took steps to suspend user ratings for serials. An Amazon source said the review takes 72 hours to help weed out trolls and ensure each review is “authentic”.
Previously, the new Disney+ Marvel She-Hulk series was also suspected of being the target of a review bombing on IMDB, quoted from the Fox News page, Sunday (4/9/2022).