This year’s Super Bowl was won by the Los Angeles Rams after a tense game, but for pop culture followers, the American Football competition final was a thrilling event in other ways, especially. In addition to Dr. Dre and musical friends like Eminem and Snoop Dogg, it was mainly the expensive commercials that occupied the mind. More than 112 million Americans watched the broadcast. Amazon must have thought it was a good time to introduce the most expensive TV series ever to the general public. Tech company founded by Jeff Bezos bought airtime to the first moving images to show the epic fantasy series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power† The highly anticipated series is based on the work of JRR Tolkien and takes place thousands of years before the events of the Lord of the Ringsbooks by Tolkien himself and the successful film adaptations by director Peter Jackson.
The first season of The Rings of Power will be available on Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service from September 2 and has reportedly already cost about $400 million. If five seasons are made, that amount can easily grow to a billion or more, according to a background article by Vanity Fair†
But we live in 2022 and a TV commercial is of course just the beginning. The one-minute teaser also immediately appeared on social media and YouTube. And especially in that last place, a big counter-reaction immediately seemed to start. In a variety of languages, including English and Russian, the same quote attributed to Tolkien kept appearing with the trailer: “Evil is incapable of creating something new, it can only distort that which has been invented or created by the forces of good and destroy.” An action by internet trolls? Or from genuinely concerned fans who fear that something bad is going to happen to Tolkien’s world?
No quality guarantee
It’s no surprise that people are skeptical about the series: an American mega-corporation spends an insane amount of money on a series based on the work of a beloved writer, someone whose work has had a major impact on the lives of many enthusiasts. A big bag of money is absolutely no guarantee of quality.
Some criticism focuses on the fact that the cast of the series will be a lot more diverse than that of the films. For example, a person of color plays an elf for the first time in a Lord of the Rings film adaptation. Also, for the first time, a black woman is seen playing a dwarf. In certain right-wing circles, this is difficult. If you search YouTube for the terms ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘woke’, you will be presented with a large series of angry videos. In the piece of Vanity Fair a Tolkien expert wonders what exactly people are so afraid of. “Who are these people who feel so threatened by the idea that an elf is black, Latino, or Asian?”
Many companies turn off the comments on YouTube videos where the comments negative, but Amazon doesn’t at the time of writing. The possible thought: let this group rage on in the comments, then it can be about the content of the series in September.
Watch the trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power here.
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