Amazon's Rings of Power is coming back for a third season

Image: Prime Video

Amazon has announced that it has renewed its Lord of the Rings series The Rings of Power for a third season. Set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, it's about the rise of Sauron and how the rings of power were forged.

Amazon announced the show back in 2017. The company said at the time that the series would be set far before the events of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and that they might run a spinoff show as well. It was an expensive endeavor for the retailer: the rights (and just the rights!) for the story was reportedly in the range of a quarter of a billion dollars. By 2019, Amazon was putting the show into production, announcing that it would be filmed in New Zealand and preemptively renewing the show for a second season. After some pandemic-related delays, the show – titled The Rings of Power – debuted in 2022, while the second season debuted in 2024.

The Lord of the Rings is a very small part of the larger world that Tolkien created. In addition to that and The Hobbit, he wrote reams of material that his son Christopher edited into a single volume, The Silmarillion, and a number of other supplemental works, which serves as a history for the world. Because of various rights issues, this series isn't based on the events of The Silmarillion (although there is some overlap) but is instead drawing from some material from Lord of the Rings – the appendixes that expand upon the world and story at the end of Return of the King. (The recent animated film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was also based on material from the appendixes.)

I rather liked the series. I'm currently working my way through the second season, and after reading The Silmarillion recently, I feel like I've got a slightly better handle on some of the background that sort of comes through. The series has been taking some interesting liberties here and there with the larger story and world, but nothing that's really taken me out of the story.

Back in 2022, we learned that the company had planned out five seasons for the show, and despite some doom and gloom reporting about viewership numbers for the series last fall, I'm glad to see that Amazon's still backing the series this far. It's certainly unheard of – Paramount+ dropped its Halo series after its second season ended – but I have to imagine that Amazon would have a high bar to walk away from this show given the amount of money it's poured into it.

Amazon says that director Charlotte Brändström and Sanaa Hamri will return behind the camera for some of the episodes this season, while Stefan Schwartz (Being Human, Fear the Walking Dead, My Lady Jane) will join the team.

The company didn't provide any sort of timeline for when Season 3 would begin streaming, but in an announcement post on the show's Facebook page, Amazon provided a brief hint at what's to come:

Jumping forward several years from the events of Season 2, Season 3 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 and conquer all Middle-earth at last.

Given that we know the rough road map for the material in the books, we know we've got the forging of the One Ring, Sauron's imprisonment in Númenor, the destruction of the island nation, and the massive war against Sauron that kicks off the world's Third Age to look forward to, in this season and whatever else they have planned beyond that.