It is another day online which means another frustrating move by studios and outlets. According to Variety, Hollywood is battling “toxic” fandoms. Actually, you’re battling about 6 YouTubers you let continually drive a narrative who you refuse to call out. The response to the toxicity is frustrating.
Many of us have been repeatedly attacked by the same 6 accounts, parading themselves as “fans” of something and using their platforms to send hate to performers, real fans, and creatives. It has made talking about things like Star Wars, The Rings of Power, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe near impossible. And yet the real fans persevere and continue to talk about the things they love.
In Variety’s deep dive, it was revealed that there will be a new superfan focus group for projects that help studios know what fans will enjoy and what they won’t. Okay, cool, who are these superfans? If you tell me that men like Star Wars Theory are in a group setting telling Lucasfilm what works for this franchise, I might throw my laptop out a window. If someone like the Critical Drinker is talking about a franchise, you’ve made a mistake.
My point is that certain “fans” are not actually fans of the thing. They’re grifters who use the success of said property to get little minions to do their bidding. They think fandom is owning merch about something but misunderstand every single thing about a character. They’re not people you want to listen to.
According a studio executive, the idea is to just get the approval from fans on a project before it is finished. “They will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate’ … If it’s early enough & the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.”
This is a horrible idea all around
Fans don’t know what is best for a project. Sorry to say, that’s not how the creative process works. Joe from down the street who loved Star Wars as a kid is not the best source for what works creatively with something. Actual writers and actors know what works from a story standpoint. Bending to the toxic fans and making sure they’re happy is a surefire way of ruining the artistic value or something.
The reality is that these franchise have always had horrible fans attached to them. These new crop of YouTubers have always been there, thinking they know the most. They are the first men to say they got mocked for loving nerdy things. But they didn’t get mocked for loving nerdy things. They got mocked for being horrible people.
Giving a platform to “superfans” is dangerous. How do you know the people you’re asking are actually good-willed fans of something and not these grifters? Are you going to look through everyone’s history with a property and check their social media? What exactly is a superfan?
All this is doing is feeding further into these angry voices and giving them agency. They are not the kind of fans you want to cater to. They ruin franchises and mock real fans who like something. Maybe if we just stopped letting these voices overpower actual fans, we wouldn’t be dealing with this. But please, do not let “superfans” call the shots.
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WHERE IS HE? It’s time to join Jo and Mal as they best Fëanor and dive deep into the latest episode of Rings of Power! They begin with their opening snapshot (3:44), before the patented House of R deep dive into each scene and explore what’s in store for our heroes and villains in Eregion, Númenor, Rhûn, and more (16:35)! Also, later wig watch check-in and a special spoiler speculation section (02:18:45).
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Producer: Steve Ahlman Video Editor: Stefano Sanchez Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal and John Richter Social: Jomi Adeniran
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Producer: Steve Ahlman Video Editor: Cameron Dinwiddie Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal and John Richter Social: Jomi Adeniran
The universe of The Lord of the Rings is extremely complicated. There are Valar and Maiar, magic trees everywhere, ambiguously powerful rings, and at least two Dark Lords who want to throw the world into chaos. One thing that J.R.R. Tolkien always made plain in his universe, however, is the difference between the right side and the bad one. Good people may get tempted by the powers of darkness, but at the end of the day the morality of The Lord of the Rings has always been black and white, a fundamental imperative for a story whose core is simply good versus evil. Which is exactly why it’s so strange that the prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, insists on making all of its characters shades of moral gray.
It’s not alone in this trend. Over the last 15 years, movies and television have been obsessed with moral ambiguity. Walter White was pushed to break bad because of an unjust system, everyone in Game of Thrones had their ideals compromised by the realities of the world, and you can’t throw a rock in the Marvel Cinematic Universe without hitting a villain that we’re supposed to believe made a few good points. There was a time when these blurry lines between right and wrong felt like a sign of maturity, an indicator that what we were watching was for adults rather than kids. But now that this has become the default state for most shows and movies, it’s too often hollow and obligatory. Moral ambiguity has become a cheap way to paper over a story that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say, and superficial flaws have become camouflage for characters too flat to make concepts like morality feel relevant at all. Ergo, it should be self-explanatory why 0=The Rings of Power is so heavily invested in the concept.
This issue was certainly present in the first season of the show, but in the first three episodes of season 2, it’s become impossible to ignore. The entire series, it seems, has been built around questions of moral grayness that seem at odds with the universe they’re based in. It’s as if the writers are convinced that minor flaws and human mistakes are the key to relatability, and that relatability is important for all its characters. Scene after scene, characters debate the morality of certain issues that seem clear. It’s one thing to know that the elves freely used Sauron’s Rings of Power when they didn’t know who created them, but after a whole scene about how they’re the tools of the enemy, watching the elves put the rings on anyway felt ridiculous, a sudden introduction of ends justifying means that was simply foreign to Tolkien’s world by clear design.
Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
Take, for instance, the show’s wildly uneven portrayal of Sauron. The Rings of Power seems obsessed with the question of why we’d want to watch Sauron act if he was entirely evil. The answer is actually simple: Sometimes evil is interesting. Far from the childishness sometimes associated with good-versus-evil stories, a well-told story that closely follows some true evil like Sauron would be fascinating and horrific. Watching him needle at the subtle insecurities and exploit the weaknesses of some of Middle-earth’s most legendary heroes could be beautifully tragic, a Tolkien-esque reminder that anyone can fall to temptation. Instead, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have chosen to make Sauron vaguely human, adding sour notes like his surprise that Celebrimbor would mislead Gil-galad, or the confusing scene in which he’s seemingly deceived by Adar to open season 2.
It’s the kind of choice that makes perfect sense on paper as a marker of prestige TV. Again, all the best shows of the last decade have complicated characters and understandable villains, full of flaws and imperfections. But in practice, adding superficial traits like that to Sauron doesn’t serve to deepen his character; it just weakens everyone around him. Their inability to see through his bumbling plot doesn’t feel like they were deceived by a master of evil, a powerful near demi-god who exists as a literal higher order of being than them, but rather that they were duped by an idiot because they themselves are just a little bit dumber.
This kind of faux morality is introduced all over the show. One side plot, barely introduced in episode 3, is about orc anxieties over the return of Sauron. Adar greets this with genuine concern. Canonically, orcs were created by Morgoth, Middle-earth’s greatest evil, as tools for his bidding and fodder for his army. But offhandedly suggesting they are supposed to be sympathetic and have feelings, without really delving into the topic, just feels like a complication of the lore for no real reason. It’s unclear what it could be setting up, or how we’re now supposed to feel about the thousands of orcs we’ve seen the heroes of Middle-earth slay.
Image: Prime Video
The same goes for many of the show’s supporting plotlines, which feel universally underbaked, confusing, and ignored. Ar-Pharazôn’s coup in Númenor, a major historic moment in the downfall of the kingdom, is relegated exclusively to episode 3, and makes almost no sense when it arrives. It’s hard to even tell in the scene why what he’s doing is bad or how exactly he’s wrong; rather than giving a villain a few good arguments, the show makes him more understandable than the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for. Similarly, The Rings of Power has a chance for a fascinating plotline with Celebrimbor as we watch Sauron draw out his ego and manipulate it for his own ends. But he gets tricked so quickly that it makes the smith seem easily duped rather than making Sauron seem like a subtle and brilliant manipulator.
None of this is to say that these plotlines being in the show at all is a bad thing, but rather that they seem like afterthoughts. Moments like Queen Míriel being tempted by the Palantir, Celebrimbor deceiving Gil-galad to feed his own ego, or even the anxieties of a concerned orc could make for meaningful, complicated moments that further our understanding of both the character and Middle-earth. But they’re rushed through so quickly, and with so little setup, that these flaws just feel like hollow gestures at storytelling rather than meaningful additions to the narrative.
What’s worse, the one morally complex plotline the show does spend time exploring — the elves’ use of the Rings of Power — has so many changes from the source material that it feels like it comes from a different fictional universe altogether. In Tolkien’s original version, the elven rings aren’t made by Sauron, just vaguely crafted using techniques Celebrimbor learned from him. The Rings of Power’s rings are created with his involvement and the elves know it. It’s a precise shift, moving the storyline from one of the subtle ways that evil can deceive good people into one about how indulging evil is worth it if there’s some personal gain to be had, like the revitalization of Linden.
Image: Prime Video
It’s a patently ridiculous idea, but it also muddies one of the most important moral ideas in the series: that goodness isn’t relative, and that an inherently evil object shouldn’t be used for good because it shouldn’t be used at all. Isildur being tempted by the power of the One Ring to believe that he could avoid Sauron’s influence is supposed to be a defining moment for the world of Middle-earth, the final tragic moment to the end of the Second Age. To have the elves simply make such a similar decision, knowingly, years before robs the future of the story all its gravity.
Watching this debate play out among the elves in the first few episodes of season 2 feels utterly baffling. It’s so fundamentally un-Tolkien that it’s hard to imagine how it could have made it into a series so ostensibly beholden to honoring Tolkien’s vision and world. The Second Age is largely one marked by deception. Sauron roams the world deceiving everyone he can in an attempt to return to his former power. Throughout this time, the whole of Middle-earth comes to be swayed by him in one way or another, some much more cataclysmically than others, but the deception is the key. Having the elves make this choice willingly only further robs Sauron of his deceptive power. More importantly, though, it also betrays the heart of Tolkien’s message about the subtle ways that pure evil can corrupt even the greatest and most brilliant people.
Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
No one character suffers more from this idea than Galadriel. Her being deceived by Sauron in season 1 was one thing, an understandable and established fact: Sauron is a master of evil and trickery, and he’ll prey on any weakness he sees and exploit it to twist your mind into doing his bidding. But in season 2 — when she understands that she aided Sauron, and that Sauron had a hand in making the three elven Rings of Power — she pushes for them to be used anyway. It’s a complete reversal of who she was in the first season. The show opens with Galadriel as the only elf who still believes Sauron is alive, and also believing that he’s so dangerous that he must be hunted down at all costs. Now, a season later, she’s begging for the other elves to use Saruon’s magic. Getting deceived by him once while he was disguised is one thing, but getting tricked by him when she knows that’s what he’s after feels foolish beyond forgiveness for such an important and heroic character.
And the greatest tragedy in all of this mess is that none of it was necessary in the first place. Tolkien’s story, and the entire Legendarium universe, isn’t built for moral grays — and that’s not a bad thing. It’s the foundational modern fantasy universe, and one of the greatest backdrops ever for stories about good versus evil. And it shouldn’t need to be more than that. The struggle to remain good in a fallen and complicated world is compelling enough on its own; they don’t need extra arguments for evil or the prestige TV insistence that there’s no such thing as good and bad. By trying to turn The Lord of the Rings into great TV, all Payne and McKay managed was to rob Tolkien’s universe of what makes it special.
The first three episodes of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes drop every Thursday.
Two years ago, Westeros and Middle-earth went head-to-head in the streaming wars. After Amazon’s Prime Video set its release date for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—by all accounts the most expensive series ever made—HBO elected to have House of the Dragon, its first Game of Thrones spinoff, premiere two weeks prior to it. HBO’s decision to intentionally overlap with another big-budget fantasy show was, frankly, the sort of political maneuvering that would make Tyrion Lannister proud. As HBO’s CEO, Casey Bloys, cheekily told The Hollywood Reporter: “It’s nice we ended up being a couple weeks ahead of time.” (When you play the Game of Content, you win or you die.) From HBO’s side of things, the gambit worked: House of the Dragon had the biggest premiere in the network’s history, assuaging any concerns that Thrones’ lackluster ending would turn away fans. Prime Video, meanwhile, had to lick its wounds: Rings of Power reportedly had a 37 percent completion rate domestically, meaning that just over one-third of viewers ended up finishing the first season. Not terrible, but not what you want from the world’s priciest show, either.
By any measure, between these two series, House of the Dragon won the battle of the first seasons: It was more popular with audiences, earned more critical acclaim, and collected more Emmy nominations. But crafting a cultural juggernaut is a marathon, not a sprint, and House of the Dragon didn’t do itself any favors in Season 2. It’s not that the second season was without memorable moments—there was Rhaenys’s fateful death, Targaryen bastards being roasted alive by the dragon Vermithor, mud wrestling—but for a show built around the promise of a Targaryen civil war, it sure has … skimped in the war department. The finale merely shuffled pieces across the board and felt like a glorified teaser trailer for Season 3, which rubbed viewers the wrong way, especially since it will likely take another two years to air new episodes. That’s a long time to keep audiences waiting; expecting them to return in droves could prove to be a fatal miscalculation.
Could HBO’s loss be Prime Video’s gain? This time around, Rings of Power premieres without any direct competition. (No shade to HBO’s Industry, which is awesome, but Succession Presents: Euphoria is not the kind of show that threatens to take attention away from Middle-earth.) If Rings of Power is ever going to live up to its massive price tag, then the summer of 2024 might be its best shot to steal some of House of the Dragon’s thunder. Of course, that’s easier said than done, especially for a series that has yet to deliver on sky-high expectations.
A quick refresher: Rings of Power’s first season is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, a period between the events of The Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We follow the warrior elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who believes that Sauron is lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to seize power. (Other subplots include the harfoots, the predecessors of our beloved hobbits, befriending a mysterious wizard who may well be Gandalf the Gray, and the Southlands falling under attack by orcs before it’s decimated and transformed into Mordor.) By the end of the season, Galadriel discovers that her human companion Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) has been Sauron all along, ingratiating himself to the elves in order to forge—wait for it—rings of power that would allow him to bend the myriad inhabitants of Middle-earth to his will.
Rings of Power was far from perfect out of the gate, but the mystery surrounding Sauron’s true identity was—for this writer, at least—more than enough to stick through the first season. (That, and the show’s outrageous production values offer a winning combination of gorgeous New Zealand landscapes and state-of-the-art visual effects.) But now that Sauron’s been unmasked, Rings of Power finds itself in a potentially precarious position. The Dark Lord is one of the most iconic villains in fantasy, but much of that intrigue lies in how little the audience knows about him. With the exception of The Fellowship of the Ring’s kick-ass prologue sequence, Sauron is mostly a supernatural presence, taking the form of a giant, disembodied eye in Mordor. Going all in on Sauron in Rings of Power could end up diluting the villain’s potency, like if Disney green-lit a hypothetical Star Wars origin story for Emperor Palpatine’s early days on Naboo.
For better or for worse, Rings of Power opts to lean into the Sauron of it all. The first 20 minutes of the Season 2 premiere give us an extensive backstory on the Dark Lord: how he tried to get the orcs to join his cause before the corrupted elf Adar (Sam Hazeldine) betrayed him, the arduous process of Sauron’s malevolent spirit taking on a new form (Sauron: Halbrand Edition), the decisions that led him to cross paths with Galadriel. This is a strange point of comparison—my brain is a curse—but everything about Sauron’s origins reminded me of Longlegs: The movie worked better when it coasted on sinister vibes, rather than attempting to explain everything about its eponymous serial killer. The same is true for Rings of Power: When Sauron is lurking in the shadows, your mind fills in the blanks; conversely, when the show feeds the audience too much information, he just seems like a weirdo obsessed with jewelry, like Middle-earth’s version of Howard Ratner.
For much of the second season, Sauron resides in the elven kingdom of Eregion, coaxing the famed smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) into kicking off a chain of events that could lead to Middle-earth’s demise. (Prime Video has forbidden me from getting more specific, but anyone with a passing knowledge of The Fellowship of the Ring’s prologue can connect the dots.) The dynamic between Celebrimbor and Sauron—taking on a new identity as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts—is among the more interesting work of the season, underlining that the Dark Lord’s greatest strength is his fiendish powers of persuasion. (“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is Season 2 in a nutshell.) At the same time, Sauron’s grand designs are too one-dimensional to warrant this much screen time. Instead, Rings of Power would’ve been better served pulling a Leftovers and letting the mystery be.
Unfortunately, spending too much time with Sauron is the least of the show’s issues. A persistent problem for Rings of Power—one that’s even more pronounced this season—is that much of the ensemble isn’t up to snuff. In Thrones’ heyday, the series could bounce around Westeros and audiences would be hooked by most (if not all) of its subplots, led by the likes of Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister, and Arya Stark. Rings of Power simply doesn’t have a deep enough bench of intriguing characters to lean on: We get frequent check-ins with Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), yet I could sum up their arcs for the entire season in a single sentence. (The Stranger also has possibly the dumbest origin story for a character’s name since Han Solo.)
What’s more, while Rings of Power puts a lot of money on the screen, the decision to move the production from New Zealand to the United Kingdom has proved to be ill-fated. Without the former’s natural landscapes, the world of Middle-earth feels more confined and narrow in scope. Whatever the reason for the switch—budgetary concerns, new locales—the gambit didn’t pay off. And with the show’s narrative taking its sweet time to progress—cocreators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay envision a five-season road map—Rings of Power draws unwanted comparisons to House of the Dragon’s second season: It’s taking far too long to get going, and by the time the characters get somewhere interesting, viewers will have to wait years for the payoff. (Assuming audiences want to return to Middle-earth in the first place.)
Given all the bad-faith criticisms of Rings of Power, I take no pleasure in the show’s sophomore slump. With all the money Amazon’s poured into Rings of Power, you’d like to think there’s still time to right the ship and that news of a Season 3 renewal will be a matter of when, not if. But with viewership not hitting the levels desired from such an expensive series, particularly one earmarked to be the “next Game ofThrones,” one has to wonder whether even a financial juggernaut like Amazon would consider cutting its losses. (Plus, the company will soon have competition from Warner Bros. with a Lord of the Rings anime movie and a Gollum stand-alone film.) For now, Rings of Power is stuck in a predicament not unlike Middle-earth as Sauron amasses power, where even the best intentions might not be enough to prevent a doomed future.
Game of Thrones is a juggernaut in the entertainment world – and has a huge cast…but how many of them chill out
For at home entertainment, Game Of Thrones (GOT) is rare, it still commands a huge audience 3 years after its finale. Law and Orderand a few others can claim such status, but it less than 1% of shows who become culturally huge. It’s consistently ranked high in engagement since it concluded and House of the Dragon,” a prequel series, is pacing ahead of Amazon’s “The Rings of Power” in demand. But who in the Game of Thrones universe uses weed?
The Game of Thrones universe can be stressful. You have to contend with everyone possibly trying to stab you in the back (literally), dragons, White Walkers, cult religions, murderous barbarians, incest, and every wedding you attend ending in murder. House of the Dragon is no easy picnic either. Fans are eager for the start of season two of Dragon.
The grand dame of GOT, Diana Ring, was a lifelong smoker of cigarettes to the end, but we have been unable to verify if she was a fan of cannabis. Peter Dinklage is a big wine buff, but no signs of an edible.
Playing characters on HBO’s GOT can be tense, which is why Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams incidentally became friends on the show. To detox from long days being Sansa and Arya Stark, the actresses would wind down like the rest of us—smoking some weed and acting silly.
“We’re kind of like loners on Game of Thrones, just because the past few seasons Maisie and I have sleepovers every night when we’re shooting. Or every night whenever both of us are in town. We just used to sit there and eat and watch stupid videos and smoke weed,” Turner said “I don’t know if my publicist will kill me for saying this. We’d get high and then we’d sit in the bath together and we’d rub makeup brushes on our faces. It’s fun.”
One big fan is Australian actress Milly Alcock. Have been spotted consuming, she stars in House of the Dragon. She made a name for herself in the comedy/drama Upright and has been in a variety of vehicles including a music vehicle.
GOT Richard Madden has since starred as Ikaris in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film Eternals (2021) and as a spy in the action thriller series Citadel (2023-present). He mingles marijuana in with all his gigs on screen.
Emilia Clarke excited fans with a brief backstage appearance with Snoop Dogg, but we don’t know if he gifted her any of his products.
Some guy is currently suing Tolkien and Amazon to the tune of $250 million. That alone takes serious bravery. But what’s notable about this lawsuit is the reason he’s suing: Copyright infringement over his Lord of the Rings fanfic. Specifically, he’s arguing that Amazon lifted elements of his fan-fiction for its own Tolkien adaptation TV series, The Rings of Power.
This New Series Completes Studio MAPPA’s Dark Trilogy
Demetrious Polychron wrote a book, a work of fan-fiction set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, called The Fellowship of the King, which he copyrighted in 2017 and which later were published and made available for sale, including on Amazon. According to PC Gamer, Polychron sent a letter to the Tolkien Estate asking for a manuscript review. That’s right: This man asked J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson Simon to sign off on his fanfic. Unsurprisingly, he did not get a response.
In September of 2022, the month that Polychron published The Fellowship of the King, Amazon also began airing its extremely expensive Lord of the Rings spin-off series, The Rings of Power. hundreds of millions of dollars on developing an adaptation called Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Now, Polychron is arguing that the Amazon TV show lifts elements from his novel.
According to RadarOnline, which has seen documents pertaining to the suit, Polychron alleges that characters and storylines he created for his book “compose as much as one-half of the 8-episode series,” and that in some cases the show “copied exact language” from his book. However, the claims seem spurious. For instance, the lawsuit purportedly points to the fact that both his book and the show feature a hobbit named Elanor, with the Elanor in his book being the daughter of Samwise Gamgee, while the Elanor featured in The Rings of Power is a Harfoot. Images purporting to be the lawsuit circulating online include a host of other circumstantial connections or similarities to back up Polychron’s argument that the writers of Rings of Power lifted ideas from his fanfic for their own story.
Polychron’s lawsuit for copyright infringement, filed on April 14, names Amazon and the Tolkien Estate as defendants in the U.S. District Court For The Central District of California. Polychron claims that his novel was “inspired” by LOTR, but is an “original” work. Nobody is convinced, not even the reviewers who had kind things to say about it. “While unabashedly derivative, The Fellowship of the King offers LOTR fans a fun, appropriately epic return to Middle-earth,” wrote Edward Sung for IndieReader. Ouch. It doesn’t sound like the book scores any points for originality, even if it’s a fun enough read.
At the time of writing, it appears that Polychron’s book has been delisted from Amazon. Kotaku reached out to Amazon to ask when it was removed, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
While no one believes that Polychron will win against the Tolkien Estate, there are concerns that the lawsuit might negatively impact the legality of fanworks in general. Hopefully, fanfic writers will be fine as long as they’re not trying to extort Tolkien’s grandson.
It’s official: You’re watching television when you want to, not when you’re told to. For the third consecutive month, Nielsen says Americans are streaming more than tuning in for old-fashioned broadcast or cable TV. Even the return of football and the fall TV season couldn’t drag down streaming, which commanded nearly 37% of all television viewing in September.
Most notably, Americans spent more time watching YouTube than any other streaming service, even Netflix. YouTube was once primarily thought of as a mobile app popular with young, cellphone-wielding users, but more and more people are watching its content—including music videos, tutorials, and vlogs—on TV screens. The company says 135 million people logged into its app from TVs last year.
Netflix had long been the most-popular streaming service in the US, according to Nielsen, though YouTube has been close behind for some time. It remained the subscription streaming app of choice for Americans in September, the month it released Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which has become the second-most popular English-language TV show in its history. (The fourth season of Stranger Things still wears the crown.) Netflix—which has 73.4 million subscribers in the US and Canada—had a significant head start in the streaming wars, launching its service well before Amazon, Apple, Disney and others flooded the market. Even with its recent challenges—it lost subscribers during the first half of the year, though it’s started to gain them back—its shows consistently top Nielsen’s ranking of streaming programs. So while it’s not surprising that it remains the most-watched subscription streamer in the U.S., it’s notable that it commands a larger percentage of total viewership than Prime Video, Disney+ and HBO Max combined.
Streaming services got an unexpected boost when people found themselves homebound during the pandemic. Combined, broadcast and cable still represent more than half of Americans’ total TV consumption. And broadcast showed signs of life earlier this year with the launch of ABC comedy breakout Abbott Elementary, which returned for a second season in September after collecting three Emmys. But Nielsen’s data shows that streaming—which first overtook cable in July after beating out broadcast for the first time in 2021—has grown its share of viewing every month since.
The only thing more precious than a ring is an NFT. Per Deadline, Warner Bros. Discovery is set to become the first major studio to release film footage as a multimedia NFT, dropping a bundle of TheLord of The Rings: Fellowship of the Ring NFTs tomorrow.
The studio is partnering with Content Blockchain pioneer Eluvio to bring footage of Middle Earth and the Shire to life via the Web3 Movie Experience. “Fans of The Lord of the Rings can now acquire, participate, and trade in an epic living media experience that will undoubtedly surprise and delight them,” said Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluvio. “It’s truly designed for a mass consumer audience, not just Web3 enthusiasts, which is why it should, and does, feel so remarkable and engaging. At the same time, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is setting a new bar for innovation in the distribution of home movies by demonstrating the potential of Web3 for consumer engagement, digital supply chain transformation, and new business opportunities.”
Each NFT features a 4K copy of the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring—the first film in Peter Jackson‘s Oscar-winning Tolkein trilogy— as well as behind-the-scenes footage, photos, and exclusive assets inspired by the film. There will be two different versions of the NFT: The Mystery Edition and The Epic Edition. The Mystery Edition will include an interactive location-based navigation menu from one of three film locations—The Shire, Rivendell, or the Mines of Moria—as well as location-specific art and hidden AR collectibles. The Epic Edition includes all the features of The Mystery Edition, as well as additional image galleries not included with the Mystery Edition. The Mystery Edition will cost $30, while the Epic Edition will cost $100.
The Lord of the Rings NFT comes on the heels of Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series, set in the second age of Middle Earth, which recently wrapped its first season. Yesterday, Lord of the Rings IP broker Thomas Dey, who recently sold the Rings IP to Sweden’s Embracer Group, told an audience at MIPCOM Cannes that he believed Lord of the Rings could become as big of a franchise as Star Wars or Marvel, and shared that Embracer has big plans in the gaming space for the fantasy franchise.
“You disappear for 10 hours and are active in that environment,” said Dey, of gaming. “So I think we will lean forward into that entertainment over the next decade and will look for other ways to do that. Audiences are demanding more than the ‘lean back’ approach.”
The Lord of the Rings NFT will be available to purchase exclusively at https://web3.wb.com on October 21, via credit card or cryptocurrency.
The Rings Of Power has wrapped up its first season and all I can say is . . . shame on everyone who had a hand in this travesty.
I’ve never seen an adaptation of a major work so badly abused, so fundamentally altered or so disrespectfully handled as the creators of The Rings Of Power have treated The Lord Of The Rings. Tolkien’s creation barely shines through the dreck.
I gave this show a chance. I went in with low expectations and for a moment was charmed by what I saw, but quickly the cracks began to show in the story and its heroes. Of Mithril, this show is most certainly not crafted.
I’ll try to parse together everything that went wrong with the whole first season in a future piece, but for now, let’s look at the travesty that is the Season 1 finale. Nearly everything that could have gone wrong has done so. Even my worst fears about this show’s quality could not match what we were actually given.
On Strangers & Red Herrings
Daniel Weyman (The Stranger)
Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
The episode opens to The Stranger wandering his way through a verdant forest when someone startles him and he drops his apple. He chases after the mysterious person and discovers that it’s Nori—only, it’s not Nori! The person he thought was Nori for all of two seconds immediately shape-shifts into the head witch, making us all wonder what the point of transforming into Nori was to begin with, since he didn’t even spot that it was her until that very moment. But okay!
The other witches approach and reveal to him that he’s . . . Sauron! This might fool some viewers, I suppose, but it’s very obvious that all of this is just a ruse to trick viewers into thinking that question has been answered (in the opening five minutes, no less!) so that they don’t pay too much attention to what the left hand is doing.
In any case, they promise to take him east to Rhûn where the veil clouding his thoughts can be removed and he can restore his powers. (Side-note: It looks like The Stranger and Nori will head to Rhûn in Season 2 which I think is a great idea—if only they hadn’t butchered Season 1 first!) This all seems to excite The Stranger who starts doing his weird wind power until the witches stop him and start tying him up (only they hear something and decide that what they should do instead is shape-shift because . . . reasons).
The Harfoots show up and see that there are only two witches so they distract them and go to release the bound Stranger—but it’s actually the head witch! You know, the witch who is so much more powerful than the Harfoots that she had literally no reason to disguise herself in the first place. Then the Stranger shows up and there’s a big old brawl the head witch lights everything on fire, and the Stranger thinks he’s bad now but Nori gives him a cheerful pep talk and then hands him the head witch’s staff.
Well, we knew he needed something to control his powers and the staff is that thing, it appears, because a moment later he’s put out all the flames and is standing tall and speaking clearly. He immediately steals a line from Gandalf telling the witches “From shadow you came and to shadow you will return!”
“Wait, you’re not Sauron!” they cry. “You’re…”
“I’m GOOD!” he says, making me question everything I know about professional writing in Hollywood, and then banishes them to, uh, the shadow with butterfly magic.
So yeah, not Sauron. Then who could Sauron be????
The Left Hand Of Darkness
Morfydd Clark (Galadriel), Charles Edwards (Celebrimbor)
Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
A magician will distract you with his right hand so that you don’t notice what he’s doing with his left hand, but the creators of The Rings Of Power have proven to be less than gifted when it comes to magic. We all saw the Mordor twist coming a few parsecs away and anyone paying attention knew Halbrand would be Sauron. Well, no surprises here.
Galadriel and Halbrand teleport all the way from Mordor to Eregion despite Halbrand having a wound that requires, ahem, “Elvish healing.” They must have ridden awfully hard to get there in just six days. People who are seriously wounded can usually ride at a gallop for days or even weeks with no complications, so nothing really crazy about this.
They show up in Eregion where Elrond and Celebrimbor are hanging out discussing what they’ll do now that the dwarves have refused them mithril. Gil-Galad is expected in a day, so it’s awfully convenient timing for Galadriel and Halbrand to show up right at that exact moment also. Thankfully this show doesn’t rely on contrivances or crazy coincidences at all.
Gil-Galad tells them that they have run out of time and he’s ordering the abandoning of Eregion. Everyone is to head to Lindon immediately so that they can all leave Middle-earth and head back to Valinor. Elrond and Celebrimbor argue for more time and Gil-Galad hesitantly gives it to them. (It’s still hilarious to me that at the beginning of this season Gil-Galad sends Galadriel away and declares it a ‘time of peace’ and just a few episodes later they have only months before the entire elvish race is doomed).
Halbrand has been taken to get some “Elvish healing” from the healers that Arondir claims the elves don’t actually have and is miraculously better a short while later. He heads directly to Celebrimbor’s workshop and sounds very excited when he discovers that the elf he’s talking to is none other than the great Celebrimbor himself. He asks about the gems and the mithril and when Celebrimbor tells him they don’t have enough, he suggests using an alloy (hence the episode’s title, “Alloyed”). A master elven smith would never think of this, of course.
“Thanks for the intriguing suggestion,” Celebrimbor says, to which Halbrand replies “Call it a gift.”
That line is, to anyone who knows anything about the actual story of the Rings of Power, a dead giveaway. When Sauron comes to the elves as Annatar he is known as the Lord of Gifts, and tries to seduce them with his promises. Gil-Galad, Elrond and Galadriel aren’t fooled, but Celebrimbor—weakened by his ambition—is, and takes Annatar into his confidence in Eregion.
It’s at this point, when Celebrimbor starts talking about forging a “new power” that Galadriel’s heckles finally come up. When she learns that Halbrand has given Celebrimbor advice, she’s instantly suspicious, though why it’s taken her this long is beyond me. She’s basically dragged him kicking and screaming all this way (after coincidentally running into him in the middle of the ocean—which, I just…words fail me—) and now she’s suspicious of him?
In any case, she has an elven clerk go find her records of the lineage of the kings of the Southlands, which the elf says will take ages, he’ll need to go to the catacombs, but he’s back pretty quickly and she learns the horrible truth: There is no king of the Southlands! The line of kings died out a thousand years ago and somehow she didn’t know that and didn’t bother to do like ten more minutes of research at the Hall of Lore in Númenor.
She confronts Halbrand and he quickly fesses up. He was born before the breaking of the song. He’s had many names. The following scene might have actually been a decent one if the setup before this point had been better, but it’s all just so contrived. Everything leading here relied on either truly radical coincidence or Galadriel being stupid (or both). They could have set this up in a much more convincing, surprising manner but they rushed it and hacked the source material to pieces in the process.
Ultimately, Galadriel refuses Sauron’s advances to rule alongside her (Sorry Kylo Ren!) and he leaves Eregion. Instead of telling Elrond and Celebrimbor the truth, Galadriel tells them to make three rings instead of two, because of…uh…balance.
They make the rings in fifteen minutes or so and stare at them in awe.
The rings that took 90 years to craft. Of course, they don’t even make the first rings—the rings of men and dwarves–in the show. Galadriel even says the rings should be for elves only. Sauron would have been there for the forging of all the rings of men and dwarves. It was part of his plan—to get the elves to make those rings so that he could make the One Ring in secret and control all the others. Celebrimbor then forged the three elven rings without Sauron’s knowledge. They only learn of Sauron’s deception when he crafts the One Ring.
But none of that is here! None of the most basic elements of the forging of the actual Rings of Power is here at all. Halbrand/Sauron spends a day in Eregion and leaves. How is this in any way true to the source? I understand that changes must be made to adaptations, but this isn’t a change. This is a complete rewrite of a pretty well-established story. And to what end?
Oh, and in order to forge the rings they need gold and silver from Valinor. Mind you, lots of the elvish stuff in Eregion is likely made out of gold and silver from Valinor but they end up using Galadriel’s dagger instead—even though it’s the only thing she has left of her brother.
Halbrand, meanwhile, hoofs it back to Mordor where we see him hiking over the mountains and staring evilly down across the volcanic plain at Mount Doom. Sorry Halbrand/Galadriel shippers, it doesn’t look like we’re getting a romance. (No mention of Celeborn this episode, either).
On Second Thought, Let’s Not Go To Númenor. It’s A Silly Place
The Rings Of Power
Credit: Amazon
We get many good looks at the Númenorean ship that brings Elendil, Miriel and that one dude who was friends with Isildur back home in this episode and I still cannot figure out where they fit everything. Where do the horses go? All the tents and food? All the people? It’s a really small ship!
Honestly, very little of any significance happens in this plotline. Elendil and Miriel talk on the boat. Elendil’s personality-deficient daughter hangs out with the dying king, who shows her the palantir before croaking. (Having just watched a far more powerful scene with a king dying over on House Of The Dragon this past Sunday, I couldn’t help but make comparisons in my head).
Ar-Pharazon has a bit of a menacing look on his face when the king dies. They raise black sails in the bay, so when Elendil and Miriel return, he sees them and knows what happened but she doesn’t and has to keep asking “What do you see? What do you see?”
That’s . . . kind of it. A little setup for Season 2, but not much else.
Many Long Farewells
Sara Zwangobani (Marigold Brandyfoot), Dylan Smith (Largo Brandyfoot), Beau Cassidy (Dilly), … [+] Markella Kavenagh (Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot)
Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
Finally, the Harfoots say goodbye to Nori and the Stranger. The Stranger is going east and when Nori calls it an adventure he tells her that no, you need companions for that. When her father tells her she needs to go with him, she readily agrees. Then we are subjected to many long, drawn out, saccharine goodbyes. If you’re going to lift stuff Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, does it really have to be the overly long farewells?
Poppy is devastated that Nori is leaving. “Why does everyone I love have to go?” she asks, to which Nori says something like “We wouldn’t learn anything new if we didn’t.” Neither suggests the obvious: You can both go! It isn’t like Poppy has any family left in the caravan. She pulls her own cart by herself (walks alone, despite the chanting) and they’re BFFs. Go together female Frodo and female Sam!
At long last Nori finally sets off with the Stranger and now we have a couple years to wait for another season about . . . well, not about anything Tolkien wrote, that’s for sure. But it’s comforting to know that the Rings Of Power and Mordor were all created within about a ten-day span! Nothing says epic fantasy like condensing thousands of years into a week and a half.
That’s quality writing, folks.
We could have had an entire season devoted to the actual forging of the rings. To Annatar/Halbrand’s deception. To the elves and their vanity. We could have waited to tell the story of Numenor until later—a story of the quest to cheat death, and the pride that cometh before the fall. So many ways this show could have taken what Tolkien actually wrote and fleshed it out into a TV series worthy of the source material. Ironically, it seems pride has been the downfall of Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings as well.
They added too much and cut too much when they had a perfectly good story to flesh out that Amazon spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase. Why not tell that expensive tale? Why make this other one up? I don’t understand.
Why did the witches think Proto-Gandalf was Sauron? This isn’t explained. They just assume it’s him, just like Galadriel just assumes Halbrand is a king (despite him telling her otherwise over and over again).
I am still reeling from the fact that they just made a show about the Rings of Power where they just tossed the Nine and the Seven out with the bathwater. How do you make Nazgul without the Nine??? What is Sauron’s motivation to even craft the One Ring now? Or invade Eragion?
I wonder if everyone could see the word Mordor in that powerpoint last week. When will they start referring to the Southlands as Mordor? Will word just spread? How does this work?
That exchange between Galadriel and Elrond is classic: “Why are you here?” “Why are you here?” They should have had Elrond say “I asked you first!” Or maybe “Well I live in Middle-earth still, you’re supposed to be in Valinor!” Oy vey.
My show was suddenly interrupted partway through by a trailer for Peripheral. I hope this isn’t a new thing Amazon is doing because that was not cool.
There was no Dwarven plotline this week, so no Durin vs Durin arguing or Durin IV blubbering, and sadly Disa is not Sauron. She’d make a good Sauron, though.
Also no Bronwyn, Arondir or Theo. I’m giving this episode one thumb up for this alone! But honestly, did any of these characters even really matter to this story in the first place? Yet we got more of Bronwyn making speeches and Theo whining than we actually got of Sauron deceiving Celebrimbor or the forging of the rings this season!
Oh, and the other Gandalf line that was stolen: “Always follow your nose.” Look, there are easter eggs and nods, and then there is just . . . goofy unoriginality. Is Gandalf just saying this to random Hobbits for thousands of years?
It’s over now, children. It’s all over. You can rest now.
