Here's the first teaser for The Rings of Power season 2

Sauron returns on August 29th, 2024

Here's the first teaser for The Rings of Power season 2
Image: Prime Video

Amazon's Prime Video has released our first look at the upcoming second season of its Middle-earth series The Rings of Power and provided us with a release date: August 29th, 2024.

The teaser brings us back to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth thousands of years prior to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings during the world's Second Age, following the rise of the dark lord Sauron, who forged the titular ring to control the world.

Some spoilers ahead for the show's first season

The series is derived from some of the deeper lore from Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, pulling in the story from the novel's appendices. In the show's first season, we followed a handful of characters as they contend with the rise of a dark power long after an epic battle between the Elves and the Dark Lord Morgoth. Galadriel (played by Morfydd Clark) has been on a mission to track down and defeat Morgoth's servant Sauron, and over the course of the season, he's well on his way to reclaiming power, with the season finale ending as Mount Doom erupts for the first time.

In this teaser for the show's second season, it looks like we're going to see quite a bit happen: the forging of the rings of power (one ring to rule them all, etc etc.), and something of what looks like a party being stood up to try and contend with the fallout that's coming.

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I rather liked Season one: I thought that it was a decent return to the world and presented an interesting story for the one of the bigger parts of the legendarium, and while there are some changes, there wasn't anything that bothered me too much. I'll be looking forward to catching up with the series when it returns in August.

The trailer comes just a week after word broke that Warner Bros. announced a pair of new Middle-earth set films, produced by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens. The first will be directed by Andy Serkis and is tentatively titled The Hunt for Gollum, and will presumably be set alongside Jackson's original adaptations of Lord the Rings and The Hobbit. (Whereas Prime Video's show is a little looser.) And later this year, the studio will release an animated film LOTR-set film called The War of Rohirrim.