Amazon's Lord Of The Rings is coming in 2022, looks a hell of a lot like Lord Of The Rings

Money can’t buy Jeff Bezos happiness, assuming that denying his employees bathroom breaks doesn’t just make him jump for joy, but one thing it can buy him is high-profile TV projects for Amazon Prime Video that simply must be successful because they cost so much goddamn money that they would serve as monuments to the follies of capitalism if they didn’t immediately rank among the most popular and critically acclaimed TV projects of all time. That brings us to Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings series, one of the most expensive TV shows ever made at nearly $500 million for the first season alone.

Amazon hasn’t said a whole lot about the show beyond the basic premise, but we know it takes place thousands of years before the actual Lord Of The Rings loses his favorite piece of jewelry in battle and then waits for it to be found by a slimy cave creep who then loses it to some filthy hobbitses, one of whom goes on an epic quest into Mordor to toss it into a volcano (as seen in The Lord Of The Rings). Now, Amazon has shared some more details—including the premiere date and a preview image—including the fact that the show “follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-Earth.” It will star Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Maxim Baldry, Nazanin Boniadi, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards, and Trystan Gravelle. (Spoiler alert: Evil definitely returns to Middle-Earth. Peter Jackson made six movies about it.)

There’s not a ton to be gleaned from the preview image other than that this Lord Of The Rings looks exactly like what you’d expect a Lord Of The Rings look like after the Peter Jackson movies, but dedicated J.R.R. Tolkien scholars can probably makes some guesses about who the person in the cape is and what’s going on with that tree. And maybe they can figure out why the set is so allegedly unsafe for stunt performers. Anyway, we’ve got a whole year and change to go before we see if this was all worth it: Season one of The Lord Of The Rings will premiere on September 2, 2022.