New York (AFP)
The big-budget series The Lord of the Rings, based on JRR Tolkien's fantasy saga, will be released worldwide from September 2, 2022, Amazon said Monday, which hopes to compete with Game of Thrones.
Amazon, which acquired the television rights to this cult work in 2017, for an estimated sum of $ 250 million, said in a statement that the "shooting of the first season (had) ended today (Monday) in New Zealand ".
Set in Middle-earth and featuring some emblematic characters from the saga, the series begins with new adventures taking place "in a period of relative peace, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books. JRR Tolkien, ”Amazon Studios added.
The episodes of the first season will be broadcast week after week, said the group, which released a first image of the series Monday on social networks.
The cast includes Cynthia Addai-Robinson, known for her role in the Spartacus series, and Robert Amarayo, who played in Game of Thrones, which has become in eight seasons a monument of the fantasy genre.
With this adaptation over several seasons of Tolkien's literary phenomenon, already successfully resumed in cinema in the 2000s, Amazon hopes to score points in the merciless battle waged by its distribution platform Prime Video, against Netflix and Disney in particular.
The American giant founded by Jeff Bezos acquired at the end of May, for 8.45 billion dollars, the almost century-old Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which allowed it to add great classics such as James Bond, Rocky to its repertoire. or the Silence of the Lambs.
© 2021 AFP