Disparu covers reviews for Season two

I predict with quite a bit of certainty it will fail worse than season 1.
Honestly with as much as Hollywood, critics and most sites are in the pocket of elites and pushing DEI, anything they say is terrible i have a high trust to believe is good. Anything they approve of and praise, i expect to fail.

Examples to cite: Suicide Squad kills the justice league, Concord, Dust Born, Stellar Blade, Wukong, Twisters 2...

Clownfish TV: Somehow Season 2 exists...

I think the problem here is that people are considering a "faithful adaptation" one that makes no changes from the source material. Well...

... I would argue that extremely few care about changes from the source (although they may say otherwise). Most understand there will be changes in adapting anything from one medium to another.

No, I would argue that the outrage with changes only really arises when those changes alter the basic themes, ideas, or major characters from the source material. This is why Jackson's LotR is so beloved -- even with some changes -- when Jackson's The Hobbit... well... isn't.

Now, if Rings of Power was a few novels or comic books, no one would care... but... in a 1B+ tv show meant to stand against Jackson's LotR films, fans react as anyone would to the basic ideas and themes of a beloved series of books being disregarded and disrespected. Add onto this the showrunners claiming the opposite -- that they are working hard to respect Tolkien -- and you have a recipe for disaster... unless... they (the showrunners) are truly creating a masterpiece that rivals Tolkien's work.

But they aren't making a masterpiece.

When I was in a prior career, I oversaw an IP that was in development as a feature at a production company many here would know. We fought over-and-over because they kept giving us scripts that undermined the themes, ideas, and characters of our IP. Ultimately the film was made... and... it was terrible. The funny thing is it ticked many of the same boxes of Rings of Power. At the end of the day I learned that modern Hollywood -- because they are creatively bankrupt -- wants to use old IP, "burn it down," and build it into something very different. The problem is there is no respect in that strategy.

Most of your linked content is politically charged in a way that's not allowed on this forum, so I'm treading very lightly here. Your sources are lying to you. They are consistently telling you untruths that confirm your bias. They're hoping that by repeatedly stating lies, the lies will become true. They don't.

The first season of The Rings of Power was a huge success for Amazon.

Your sources are showing you completion rates (US only) and gladly interpret those completion rates for you. They don't tell you how The Rings of Power fared internationally; they won't tell you how many millions of people actually watched the show from beginning to end; they don't compare investment to viewer base.

Maybe it was an undeserved success; maybe it was the kind of success that you can actually buy with vast sums of money; maybe the people who watched this show just to hate on it had significant part in its success; maybe Amazon imorally boosted its success by deleting negative reviews on their sites (including imdb); and maybe Amazon would have liked the series to fare even better.

But the success is a fact, and this fact is against your religion.

Forbes: "As for the 37% number [of audience retained by the end of season 1], that’s bad. There’s no spinning that."
Vainamoinen: Hold my beer.

There wouldn't be any way to know except what Amazon itself says, and Amazon itself says it was their most successful premier ever, and the show itself having had 100 million viewers, which is also a record for Amazon. Of course, Amazon could be totally lying, but then critical reception has also been great for the show.

So for people talking about how big of a flop it is, I have no idea what they're talking about.

Personally, I went into the first season with an open mind. People go on and on about "faithful adaptation", but that's a pretty silly desire, and doesn't necessarily make a good show (and often the opposite).

I think Amazon mentioned they wanted their on "Game of Thrones", which yeah, I don't think would be a good fit for a LotR adaptation, and the tone isn't how I personally would like to have seen a LotR adaptation (GoT isn't really a good measuring stick for that), but then again, I feel that The Hobbit messed up the tone as well.

I found the first season reasonably watchable and looking back at it from now, pretty forgettable. The thing that bothered me most about it was totally unrelated to all the nonsense politics and stuff people are obsessing over here. But it has bothered me about a lot of TV recently, which I blame JJ Abrams for: this obsession about building up mystery to build up hype. The identities of the old man and the human male lead were build up throughout the season, and "culminated" with the finale. But those mysteries and the reveal serve nothing in the story.

I'll probably still watch the next season

Forbes no thanks, 11 years and counting. The headline is not very confidence inspiring either. The following sources are probably not perfectly balanced either, but at least they give you more than a single number that in isolation doesn't tell you a damn thing.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2022-10-13/lord-of-the-rings-rings-of-power-amazon-season-1-audience
https://winteriscoming.net/2022/10/23/was-the-rings-of-power-a-success-for-amazon/
https://www.cbr.com/lotr-rings-of-power-response-positive/

Don't fall into the GWGB trap. It's the single most demonstrably false conspiracy theory ever devised.

So did I. But I still didn't continue after the first episode until months later, because it really was a very slow start.

The same could be said for the Lord of the Rings books though.

Most of the people I know who started reading the book stopped before they finished Concerning Hobbits. Those who continued were easily less than the 37% that Forbes dug out.

So, if we judged the success of the book in the exact same way Forbes does with the series, The Lord of the Rings would have to be considered a hilarious and laughable failure.

The percentage value of people who started, but didn't finish a series tells you absolutely nothing, and it's absurd how a magazine with a supposed focus on business and investment publishes such irrelevant nonsense.

If a thousand people watch your 465 million dollar series and 99% finish watching it, it's still a bomb.
If over a hundred million people watch your 465 million dollar series and just 37% finish watching it, it's a success.

I started the books at age 13, and got stuck in the Two Towers, ended up finally finishing them around 16 or 17. Personally, despite me leaning favourably towards the TV series, I don't think they're anywhere near the level of the books, and that would be a pretty unfair comparison. I don't even think they're iconic establishments within the scope of fantasy TV series.

Thanks for your elaborate reply. Excuse me if I'm picking out just one paragraph here but that is the one I have a slight issue with.

It should be clear that no company would ever label their product a flop. This has nothing to do with lying or not. I used to work in a PR agency and you can make anything look great without lying (which could get you in legal trouble), so you'll never hear "well, we messed this up". The question which we cannot really answer is if they really consider 100M views a success for a show with a budget like this or if they rather aimed for 10x of that. Whether it is a record or not doesn't tell us much either, as it is more or less the first high profile production on their relatively new platform (in fact, anything but a record would have meant a spectacular flop).

Of course. Nothing compares to the books and that's a good thing, right? I mean, the Harry Potter movies compare pretty well to the books, and that's not a seal of quality is it? ;)

I must have read most of TTT and RotK at age 14 in a small room reserved for language students in Hastings, in the Summer of 1992. Absurdly, even though I was in England at the time, I've read the German edition.

Exactly. There's no sensible data to compare it to. Now, when House of the Dragon started with pretty much exactly the same instant 10 million views, the HBO folks were extatic to say the least. But that series was 20 million an episode and not the 58 million of RoP.

We can however rule out a "massive flop" for several reasons, not least of all because there's a Season 2 with an even higher budget.

Say about rich folks what you will, but the few things they know is that business is business, and when you fail hard, you announce your losses loudly for tax cut reasons, then move on to your next supposedly big thing.

Season 2 was greenlit before season 1 aired (they started filming a month or so after it dropped) so this doesn't tell us anything. Season 3 will be interesting, though...

Also I just recognized, that barbark was speaking about 100M vierERs not views. Viewers is not a hard metric as it includes an estimate of how many people are sitting in front of a single screen on average and if this is their own estimate it will no doubt be very high. If this is true and not just a typo I'd consider this as huge clue that they are hiding something.

Yes, indeed, nowhere near as prestigious as "winteriscoming.net" :D

Are you seriously trying to juxtapose hard facts with "most of the people I know"? :D And the percentage of people who finished reading a book is not the same to the sales of the book as the percentage of people who are still watching to the success of a tv series. To conflate the two is just baffling.


Honestly... I'm done... I'm so done with this thread. I was an idiot to even open it again and let myself respond to anything at all. The level of discussion around here makes kindergarten look like that time Data was playing poker with Hawking, Einstein and Newton.

Everybody have a good one.

If you say so. I tend to post links to covering news, and clownfish covers pop culture and happenings (usually comic books, Disney failings, Movies, and Video Games, Politics very rarely), not who you should vote for, or what's happening politically.

Also if you think Rings of Power was a success, I'm sure you'll also say the Acolyte, Asoka, and Disney's Dr Who were successful. Pretty sure they weren't.

yea, maybe in a same manner that people know Andromeda is the worst game you can find on the EA store. Worst critics, an acknowledgment from the Development team (or was it the PR department) and such low sale figures overall

The first season was a colossal failure.

The only reason there is a season 2 is because Amazon paid so much for the rights (and production) that it is "easier" to try and dig out of the hole (and possibly somehow turn things around) than just abandon the property, have an unfinished series (the showrunners pitched the project as 5 years), and take a huge write-off now.

With reviews of the 2nd season being far worse than the first (and even stalwart champions like Variety changing their tune on the series), I wouldn't expect 5 seasons. I would expect a much smaller season 3 (possibly abbreviated) to end the show. That gives Amazon the ability to package their show as having 3 parts, a "trilogy" if you will (also, they will want to end the show prior to season 4 which usually means a re-negotiation of contracts), time to try and re-frame their series as an ambitious experiment that was ahead of it's time (misunderstood), and the ability to back out of the disaster saving face (while behind-the-scenes ultimately writing the whole thing off).

If Amazon would have cast stars in major roles, I can guarantee they would have begun leaving after season one -- the writing was on the wall that this show was / is a dumpster fire. Now with this said...

... you are allowed to enjoy the show. People like all sorts of things that others feel are "bad." Heck, I love Hudson Hawk! But I would caution about creating a personal narrative that doesn't allow for facts. For instance: I love Hudson Hawk. Was Hudson Hawk a commercial success? No. Is Hudson Hawk well written? No. Can I still enjoy it (and have a few laughs)? Yes. the fact that I love it didn't make it a success... or even "objectively" good.