Amazon’s confirms Lord of the Rings show set in the Second Age, includes Númenor

[elderpricely]

Amazon’s #LordOfTheRings TV Show Confirms Second Age of Middle Earth and Númenor Setting https://t.co/iA3fnB2wr6 pic.twitter.com/Pv7T0G12cN
- IndieWire (@IndieWire) March 8, 2019

Amazon has confirmed its upcoming “Lord of the Rings” television series will be set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth, putting to bed rumors the series would focus on the

Comments

[megalixer]

How much Númenor stuff are they allowed to use? That could be a baller TV show if fleshed out but I can't remember how much of it past the family trees is actually covered in the LOTR appendices and how much of the actual story is presumably stuck w/ the rights to the Silmarillion that they don't have.

[zhyvae]

I wonder if the Unfinished Tales also falls under Silmarillion rights, that's the only other source they could draw from for this iirc

[megalixer]

I wanna say that they ONLY have the rights to stuff that's in LOTR/The Hobbit since that's what was sold off in the 70s.

But yeah, the whole Second Age is like, three pages in the appendices, I'm looking at them rn. They do somewhat read like an in-universe Wikipedia page for the Silmarillion so they mightttt be able to hack it but it def. feels like a very "letter of the law" way around it to me. I want a whole season on Ar-Pharazon and yung Sauron drama but they'd have to pull that from like three paragraphs.

I bet that they'll start in Númenor but go into the start of the Third Age, founding Gondor + Isildur drama p. quickly since there's a lot more on that for them to pull from that they indisputably can use.

[zhyvae]

Yeah, I feel like they might take the fall of Númenor as a starting point and the war, and then the making of the rings, and then maybe the loss of the kingdom of Anor? That's all in the appendices and it would draw people in who have only seen the movies.

[shadowqueen28]

The two things we know are that the Tolkien estate shopped this project to Amazon and Amazon paid them $250 million for the rights. I wouldn't consider it out of the realm of possibility that Amazon got more than just what's in LotR. Committing to multiple seasons and paying so much money for this show--and if it's true that the Tolkien estate came to them--makes me think they've got what they need to do the whole Second Age properly.