If the embed goes dark, the trailer is here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=maP_Kyy3DCA
Three months after the Comic-Con teaser, Prime Video has released the full trailer for season three of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and Sauron has finally stopped being coy. Charlie Vickers has swapped Halbrand’s floppy hair and Annatar’s cheekbones for the full spiky ironmongery, and by the end of the footage the Dark Lord gets the One Ring onto his finger. Amazon’s accompanying press release calls the season “highly anticipated”, as all press releases are contractually obliged to do, but for once the phrase has a point. Three years of rings for Elves, rings for Dwarves and rings for anyone who stood still long enough have been leading to this.
The story jumps five years past the fall of Eregion. Sauron’s armies have rolled over most of the map, the Dwarves have bricked themselves up in Khazad-dûm with the family squabbling that implies (Eddie Marsan joins as Thráin, Durin IV’s older brother), and Númenor is drifting towards civil war, because nothing says island paradise like factions. Daniel Weyman’s Gandalf is off in Rhûn wielding magic and persuasion in roughly equal measure. Sauron’s Ring-servants now stalk about in black armour under the name Nazgnagôl, a word that looks like a Scrabble bag tipped down the stairs. Jamie Campbell Bower arrives as Celeborn, Galadriel’s long-mislaid husband, and Simon Pegg voices the Balrog. So the beast that Gandalf will one day order back into the shadow on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm will, for now, sound like the bloke from Spaced. The first four episodes drop on 11th November, two more on 18th November and the final pair on 25th November.
Which brings us to the bit of any Rings of Power conversation usually conducted in the corner of the pub, by men in Gondor T-shirts clutching a well-thumbed Unwin paperback of the Appendices. Season one launched in September 2022 to more than 25 million viewers worldwide on its first day, Prime Video’s biggest premiere ever. The finishing line was another matter. The Hollywood Reporter later reported that only 37% of American viewers who started the season completed it (45% overseas), when around 50% counts as merely respectable in the trade.
Season two did not stop the bleeding. Samba TV counted 902,000 US households watching the premiere in its first four days, against 1.8 million for season one in three. Nielsen put premiere week at just over a billion minutes, down on the first season even though more episodes were available, and Luminate’s figures, reported by Deadline, had total minutes watched falling by around 60%. Amazon’s own Fallout, a programme about irradiated Californians, pulled in roughly double the viewing. Amazon’s answer was to keep quoting its own totals: 55 million global viewers for season two before the finale, and now a claim that the series has passed 185 million. Since Amazon declines to say what counts as a viewer, that figure may well include every cat that has ever walked across a remote with autoplay switched on.
None of this would matter much if the show were cheap, but this is the most expensive television ever made. The first season reportedly cost around $465 million, and the five-season plan is estimated at about a billion dollars, so every traditionalist who switched off after episode two is a costly absentee.
The traditionalists’ complaints were never really about budget. Tolkien’s Second Age runs for well over three thousand years, and the show crushes the forging of the Rings, the fall of Eregion and the slow rot of Númenor into what feels like a long weekend. Amazon bought the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Appendices included, but not The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, so the writers have been working from a sketch map and inking in their own roads. Galadriel became a sword-swinging commander, a probable Gandalf fell out of the sky millennia ahead of schedule, and Celebrimbor got conned in a few episodes rather than a few centuries. To be fair, season two sharpened things up. Its Rotten Tomatoes audience score rose from 38% to 49%, which in Tolkien terms is like getting out of Mordor with only one finger missing.
Prestige Tolkien has always had a fraught relationship with the bean-counters. Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated The Lord of the Rings stopped dead after Helm’s Deep, its second half was never made, and a generation of children came out of the cinema wondering what happened to Frodo. Amazon at least has a five-season commitment and has reached the halfway mark with the Ring finally forged, which is more than Bakshi managed.
Whether it wins back the Appendices crowd is another matter. Sauron needed only one Ring to bind them. Amazon is trying four episodes in one go.
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