Morfydd Clark as Galadriel; Charlie Vickers as Sauron in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.' Courtesy of Prime Video Logo text Prime Video‘s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is already looking ahead to a fourth season.
With the show’s third season set to premiere in November, the show’s UK-based production is eyeing a schedule that includes preproduction on a fourth season this fall, with shooting to begin in early 2027.
To be clear, season four is not officially greenlit, but Prime Video has continued to be very bullish about continuing its piece of The Lord of the Rings franchise, which is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Second Age appendices.
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Amazon says the Amazon MGM Studios-produced series has attracted over 185 million viewers worldwide and “is one of the highest performing and most-viewed titles ever on Prime Video.” The first season marked the largest launch of any Prime Video series ever. The second season also performed well, debuting atop Nielsen’s Streaming Top 10 chart in 2024.
The third season will jump ahead “several years” from season two, and takes place at “the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the One Ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war, bind all peoples to his will — and at last rule all Middle-earth.”
Given the release cadence of the first three seasons, and the company’s current season four production plan, the fourth season seems likely to drop in 2028. When Amazon acquired the television rights for The Lord of the Rings appendices from the Tolkien Estate in 2017, it also made a five-season production commitment at the time.
The news comes amid a surge in LOTR development on the film side. Warner Bros. has ramped up mining of its LOTR rights — to Tolkien’s Third Age — for story slivers that might be worth fleshing out as feature films. First up is The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis, which is scheduled for release Dec. 17, 2027. In addition to Serkis reprising his performance-capture role of Gollum from Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, the film also has Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood reprising their roles as Gandalf and Frodo, respectively, and Jamie Dornan stepping into the role of Aragorn. Set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, the film tracks Aragorn and Gandalf’s urgent search to find Gollum before Sauron’s forces do.
In March, Peter Jackson announced the development of yet another film with the working title The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, which is set decades after The Return of the King (yet includes events from chapters in The Fellowship of the Ring which were left out of Jackson’s trilogy). Stephen Colbert is co-writing the script along with his son Peter McGee and Philippa Boyens.
Earlier this month, Jackson told Deadline that he and Warners were also in discussion with Tolkien’s estate to adapt previously unavailable works, such as The Silmarillion, a collection of myths and stories set in Middle-earth. Jackson noted that there is “a lot more Tolkien writing that would actually make great movies.”
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