After much anticipation and speculation, Amazon Studios finally released the first teaser trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, though it seems that the new sneak peek has left a lot of Tolkien fans unimpressed.
Having spent nearly $1 billion in overall expenses, the company literally has a lot of money riding on this ambitious undertaking, set to adapt the Second Age of Middle-earth in Tolkien’s expansive legendarium. Over the past month, we’ve received a ton of new promo content for The Rings of Power, though none have particularly gone out of their way to hype fans or even justify the adaptation in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong; this series has the potential to rival Game of Thrones in terms of popularity in a couple of years, not to mention that any reimagining of Middle-earth in live-action should be a joyous occasion in and of itself. The problem is that a large portion of the fandom isn’t sold on the premise of the series, which even the showrunners have described as “the novel Tolkien never wrote.”
Now, if you’re wondering why you see the same message all over social media wherever The Rings of Power comes up, you should know that fans are currently organizing a smear campaign against the show by quote-bombing the posts on social media, whether it be the YouTube trailer or promotional posts on Instagram or Twitter.
The phrase is allegedly from J.R.R Tolkien himself, and it reads as: “Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.” You’ve guessed it, the evil in question here would be Amazon.
Thanks to Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogies, Tolkien’s world is an established phenomenon even in the cinematic domain, so a degree of backlash was always going to be inevitable. Hopefully, Amazon Studios will find a way to win fans over by the time the series premieres on Sep. 2.
