30 Things You Didn't Know About The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The streaming giant entered a bidding war with Amazon Studios, who eventually won and acquired the rights for $250 million.

HBO was approached by the Tolkien estate to pick up the series—largely due to its connection to the distribution company of the original trilogy. Since HBO is associated with New Line Cinema, it could have potentially used material from the films.

In a very rare move, the Amazon founder personally worked on the agreement between Warner Bros, the Tolkien estate, and Amazon. For years, he reportedly pushed his entertainment division to come up with a fantasy series that would rival HBO's Game of Thrones, and this was it for him.

The highly-anticipated project has been literally years in the making.

September 2, 2022 is the 49th anniversary of the iconic writer's death.

A total of $1 billion—yes, billion—is expected to be spent on its production.

Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay said in a press release that Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power unites all the major stories of Middle-earth's Second Age. They teased that audiences have only seen the story of the One Ring on-screen—until now. Diehard fans know, before there was one ring, there were may.

"You have to go through such clearance, and they have all their windows taped closed," Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke told The Hollywood Reporter about the writers' room. "And there's a security guard that sits outside, and you have to have a fingerprint to get in there, because their whole board is up on a thing of the whole season."

While the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien gave Amazon plenty of creative freedom for new characters and plots, they were not allowed to contradict or change anything about the age in which the original story takes place. "It is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created, it is necessary to remain 'tolkienian,'" Token scholar Tom Shippey told German fan site The German Tolkien Society.

In the original Lord of the Rings, the Second Age lasted for thousands of years. That would've been difficult to bring into the show, since it would mean all of the humans would die off—leaving only the same Elven characters over the course of the series. Production worked with the Tolkien estate to shorten the timeline so that viewers can stay "emotionally invested" in the characters.

Before passing away in February 2022, the pioneer of visual effects supervised the epic 1-minute clip. It was filmed by pouring a mixture of hot bronze and aluminum onto sand letters in extremely slow motion.

Show creators wanted to hire a diverse cast. "If you’re going to tell this story in 2022, this to me feels like the only way to tell it, the only way to represent it," actress Cynthia Addai-Robinson, who stars as Queen Regent Míriel, told Yahoo Entertainment. "And I think people have been really hungry to see full representation in this world. Because at the end of the day this story is all about people of different backgrounds coming together for a common cause."

The series made sure to stray from the male-centric plots that came before it. "Every woman has agency on this show," Nazanin Boniadi, who plays Bronwyn, revealed to Yahoo Entertainment. "Every female character is not there to serve the male characters around her. Every one of us has autonomy and our storylines."

The cast shot in New Zealand from 2020 to 2021, but paused for several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While New Zealand closed its borders in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the series was one of seven shows granted exemptions to allow cast and crew members to enter the country.

The Dwarven prosthetics weren't easy to apply, but the actor's transformation into Prince Durin IV will be one of the most memorable of the entire series.

Expect most—if not all—loose ends and lingering questions to be answered by the end of the series. "The rights that Amazon bought were for a 50-hour show. They knew from the beginning that was the size of the canvas—this was a big story with a clear beginning, middle, and end," showrunner J.D. Payne told Empire.

Without the fear of being cancelled mid-series, showrunners and writers were granted the time and space to cover even the smallest of details—J.D. Payne told Empire there are things in the first season that don't pay off until Season 5. "We even know what our final shot of the last episode is going to be," he teased.

If you recognize Robert Aramayo, that's because he played a young Ned Stark in the hit HBO series. Years later, he's playing a younger version of another major character: Elrond Half-elven.

"One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age," showrunner Patrick McKay told Vanity Fair. They did find a fun workaround, however. Hobbit ancestors, called harfoots, will make an appearance.