‘The Lord of the Rings’: Everything You Need to Know About Amazon’s Big Money Adaptation

[Editor’s note: This story was originally published on October 7, 2019]

While Amazon has become an Emmys juggernaut with more intimate series like “Fleabag” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” those kind of character-based stories are not all the streaming service does – or plans to do. And no upcoming series proves that point more than Amazon’s long-awaited, multi-season television adaptation of material surrounding J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

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Since it was originally announced in 2017, news about the show has come in fits and starts. In recent months, 20 new cast members joined the project and a synopsis of the series was reported by TheOneRing.net. In that synopsis, it confirms that locations that will be included in the series are Númenor, the Misty Mountains, and the elf-capital of Lindon. The story will take place in Tolkien’s Second Age era, millennia before the events of “The Hobbit.”

Including multiple trailers for the show, a handful of noteworthy details about the series have been released since its announcement. Perhaps the most startling: that the total price tag for the first season of the show is estimated to come in at $450 million. (By comparison, a season of “Game of Thrones” was estimated to cost $90 million, or about $15 million an episode.) According to New Zealand publication Stuff, the amount was ascertained by the NZ$160 million tax credit the production will receive for filming in the country. To receive a tax credit of that amount, the budget is estimated to come in at just shy of half a billion American dollars.

IndieWire has compiled a list of key details about the upcoming series. From its big shoes to fill as another Tolkien adaptation to its hush-hush casting, below is everything you need to know about Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

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