Are you ready to head back to Middle Earth? Amazon Studios revealed the title and trailer Wednesday for its highly anticipated prequel to the “Lord of the Rings” series, called “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”
The series will debut on Prime Video on Sept. 2.
“The Rings of Power” is set in the Second Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
The series “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,” Amazon said in its YouTube description for the trailer.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted an image of himself holding a big slab of wood with the series title on it. “Can’t wait for you to see it,” he wrote.
IGN has behind-the-scenes details on how the title sequence was created, and it wasn’t with CGI, but rather with molten metal and a “hunk of reclaimed redwood.”
Amazon first announced that it had acquired the rights to adapt Tolkien’s work in 2017.
“’The Lord of the Rings’ is a cultural phenomenon that has captured the imagination of generations of fans through literature and the big screen,” Sharon Tal Yguado, head of Scripted Series for Amazon Studios, said in a statement at the time.
Tolkien’s book series was named Amazon customers’ favorite book of the millennium in 1999. Director Peter Jackson’s theatrical adaptations included “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001); “The Two Towers” (2002); and “The Return of the King” (2003). The films grossed nearly $6 billion worldwide and won a combined 17 Academy Awards, including Best Picture for “King.”
