It's hard to dispute that The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power has been a failure. It was the world's most expensive TV series of all-time to produce but the actual end product has been lacking. Fans and critics alike have sometimes bashed the series, sometimes mocked it, or perhaps worst of all, just shrugged it off. Something that has hardly gone unnoticed by Amazon executives and now there are rumours of big changes for season two and beyond where series creators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay could be thrown out into the cold.
The speculation started during one of the recent episodes of Midnight's Edge where industry veteran Chris Gore mentioned what he heard from his contacts in the industry.
"I heard from someone who has a connect at Amazon that - if you wanna know - that effectively, they're going to be retooling".
"And [Payne and McKay] are more than likely...they're not gonna be publicly fired, but their role will be reduced."
"Potentially just remaining in the writers room," he added, "but my understanding is they're looking for more experienced showrunners."
"Amazon is well aware of the problems".
"And what they're doing behind the scenes is they're freaking out that this was more of a failure than could have been anticipated."
Of course it was pure madness from the start to bring in such inexperienced series producers but hopefully Amazon can still save the sinking ship from completely capsizing. The differences have been even more apparent with the simultaneously released House of the Dragon, a series that has enjoyed tremendous success unlike The Rings of Power, which at the time of writing has scores and ratings of 39% on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.5 on Metacritic.
What changes do you think Amazon needs to make to save The Rings of Power, and what did you think of the first season?