Amazon Prime's very expensive new Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, is out on September 2, and they've released the longest trailer yet, a two-and-a-half minute clip they're calling the "main teaser" that follows two shorter teasers: one that aired as a commercial during the 2022 Super Bowl, and another that was exclusively available to Prime subscribers. Watch it below.
The new trailer features a look at returning characters Elrond (Robert Aramaic), Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and Isildur (Maxim Baldry), along with Elendil (Lloyd Owen), Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle), Queen Regent Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), Númenóreans Kemen (Leon Wadham), and Eärien (Ema Horvath), Dwarves King Durin III (Peter Mullan) and Prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur), High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker), Harfoots Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), Marigold Brandyfoot (Sara Zwangobani), Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards), Sadoc Burrows (Sir Lenny Henry), and more.
The Rings of Power is set during Middle Earth's Second Age, well before the events of The Lord of The Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, and it will focus on the rise of Sauron (including, of course, his creation of the rings referred to in the title), and the fall of Númenor. Showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne told Vanity Fair that Amazon has the rights to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit, so the show won't include material only referenced in The Simarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or other books. "There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to," McKay told Vanity Fair. “As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with."
"We took all these little clues and thought of them as stars in the sky that we then connected to write the novel that Tolkien never wrote about the Second Age," Payne added to Vanity Fair, continuing, "We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkienian and gelled with the experts."
