Amazon says global streams for the second season of flagship series The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power are less than half the total for the Tolkien adaptation’s first season, raising eyebrows over the future of a television series often touted as the most expensive ever . The second series of the Prime Video show reached 55 million viewers worldwide ahead of the release of its final episode at 5pm (AEST) on October 3. The first instalment of the five-season show, which The Hollywood Reporter has estimated will cost $US1 billion ($1.
5 billion) in total, has now been viewed by more than 150 million people. Charlie Vickers as Sauron in season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video Last week, Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, told a Prime Video presentation in London that the studio expected the same growth for season two it experienced for season one.
Data from Nielsen showed that from August 26 to September 1, the week the first three episodes of the new season became available, US viewers streamed 1 billion minutes across all eleven available episodes. That was down from 1.3 billion minutes in the week only the first three episodes of season one were available two years prior.
The show attracted 25 million viewers when it premiered in 2022, the biggest single day in the platform’s history. But it also drew the ire of “toxic” fans , some critical of the show’s dialogue and changes to source material, others its.