Once again, The Lord of the Rings business is booming, with Amazon funneling a whopping $465 million into the first season of the upcoming TV show, having initially shelled out a fortune just to secure the rights and commit to five seasons of content based on the J.R.R. Tolkien back catalogue.
Meanwhile, over at Warner Bros., animated feature film The War of the Rohirrim has been fast-tracked into development and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum video game is in development for next-gen consoles. Diehard fans of the lore have spent a long time wondering about whether or not The Simarillion would ever get the live-action treatment, and a new report claims that Amazon’s epic fantasy series will be incorporating elements of the book into its narrative.
The Tolkien Estate have been very reluctant to give up the rights to The Simarillion, something Peter Jackson believes is due to the estate’s apathy towards his Lord of the Rings trilogy, even though almost everybody else considers them a trio of the modern era’s greatest cinematic achievements.
If that wasn’t enough, the report in question even posits that some of the mythology from Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth will make it into the TV show, which you can read below.
“For the 1st time EVER: elements & passages from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales are licensed by Amazon Studios for this adaptation [we broadly speculate those are sections of the book relative to Númenor and Rings of Power including full rights to stories licensed in the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, which already mention Númenor and much more. Actors had posted instagram pics from Silm over the last 18 months.”
Those not well-versed in the history of Middle-earth might be wondering what all the fuss is about, but The Simarillion and Unfinished Tales feature the forging of the Rings of Power and the creation of the orcs, pivotal moments in the overarching Lord of the Rings story. The Tolkien estate have a much greater involvement in the Amazon project than they did with Jackson’s work, so it makes sense they’d be more willing to hand over the source material to the streamer.
