Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. The first trailer has been released in conjunction with this year’s San Diego Comic-Con

This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness.

Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.

Developed by showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay for the streaming service Prime Video, the series is set thousands of years before Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the Second Age of Middle-earth. It is produced by Amazon Studios with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema.

Amazon bought the television rights for The Lord of the Rings for US$250 million in November 2017, making a five-season production commitment worth at least US$1 billion. This would make it the most expensive television series ever made. Payne and McKay were hired in July 2018, with the rest of the creative team publicly revealed a year later.

The series is primarily based on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, which include discussion of the Second Age, and it features a large cast from around the world. For legal reasons it is not a direct continuation of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies, but the production intended to evoke the films with similar production design and younger versions of characters who appear in them.

Filming for the first eight-episode season took place in New Zealand, where the films were produced, from February 2020 to August 2021, with a production break of several months during that time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power makes its big debut on Amazon’s Prime streaming service on September 2, 2022.

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