Amazon has decided to produce its upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series in the UK from the second season on. Although the first season was filmed in New Zealand, as with Peter Jackson's movies, Amazon now says pre-production on season two will begin early next year in the UK while season one post-production continues in New Zealand through June.

It's not clear exactly where the series will be shot. Amazon is shipping the complex sets it built for the first season over to the UK and is currently booking stages for them, according to Deadline. The company films several Prime Video series in the UK already, including Neil Gaiman adaptations Goo …

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The first season of Amazon's The Lord of the Rings TV show is reported to cost the retail giant a frankly difficult to imagine $465 million to produce. Just to save you from having to re-read that, this price tag is for just one season, and that there is not a missing decimal in the above number. "This will be the largest television series ever made," New Zealand's Minister for Economic Development and Tourism said.

But this honor was already something of a known quantity, after Amazon spent $250 million to secure the rights to the franchise in 2017, kicking off a round of stories declaring the not-yet-produced show "the most expensive" te …

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Amazon has selected a director for its upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's J.A. Bayona, reports Deadline. Bayona will direct the first two episodes of the series and will serve as executive producer along with producer Belén Atienza. The announcement doesn't reveal when the series will debut on Amazon Prime Video or what other directors will be involved in the series.

In the announcement, Bayona confirmed what Amazon had been teasing earlier this year: the show will be set in the "Second Age" of Middle-earth, and it will be a "never before seen story." Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, said in a …

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Amazon's big Middle-earth-set show based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is slowly moving forward. During this week's Television Critics Association press tour, the company says that it has brought on two writers, JD Payne and Patrick McKay, to write and develop the series.

The two writers are relative newcomers: both worked on the original script for Star Trek: Beyond, were part of the writer's room for Godzilla vs. Kong, and are writing the upcoming sequel to Star Trek: Beyond, which will be helmed by S.J. Clarkson. Deadline says that the duo will help manage a writer's room for the project, and that Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke said …

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Last November, Amazon announced that it had acquired the rights to produce a multiseason show set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. The Hollywood Reporter now says that Amazon's show might include material from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and that it must go into production "within two years."

As the race for high-quality television content has heated up among streaming services, Amazon has been on the hunt for big, ambitious television projects to keep up with the likes of Netflix as well as Apple and Disney's forthcoming streaming platforms. Its acquisition of The Lord of the Rings franchise brings them an e …

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Earlier this month, news broke that Amazon was trying to close a deal to bring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to life as a television series, and now it looks like it's actually going to happen. Amazon has announced that it has acquired the TV rights for the book series, with a multi-season commitment. But the twist is that this will apparently be a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, rather than the story audiences already know so well.

"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 at Amazon St …

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Amazon Studios has been looking for a way to duplicate HBO's success with Game of Thrones, and the company may have found a solution: adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings into a TV series. Variety reports that the company is currently in talks with Warner Bros. Television and the late author's estate, and while discussions are said to be in "very early stages," it is clearly a high priority, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself involved in the negotiations.

Amazon isn't the only looking into the rights, according to Deadline, which reports that the Tolkien Estate is looking to sell the television rights to the iconic fantasy series …

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Earlier this month, Variety reported that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos issued a mandate to the company's studio: produce more "high-end drama series with a global appeal." This morning, Variety reported that the company is following that order by moving forward with three major science fiction shows: adaptations of Larry Niven's Ringworld, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and Greg Rucka's Lazarus.

Since launching the studio in 2010, Amazon has earned considerable acclaim for its shows, such as The Man in the High Castle, Transparent, and The Grand Tour, but it seems that Bezos is setting his sights a bit higher. In an interview with Variety earlier t …

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