Amazon Prime's Lord of The Rings TV Show Isn't Trying To Compete With The Peter Jackson Trilogy

Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings trilogy set the standard for contemporary filmmaking having adapted the previously thought impossible to bring to live-action books into instant classics. With Amazon Prime ready to unleash the denizens of Middle-Earth once again with The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power, the pressure is mounting for showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay, along with director and executive producer JA Bayona.

Talking to Empire, the trio gets into how they can easily fall into a mental trap about what's been set before them, but can still keep moving with what they have planned.

"You can psych yourself out in keeping up with the Joneses, but one of the mantras on this was 'go back to the source material'," McKay explains. "What would Tolkien do?"

"Anyone approaching Lord Of The Rings on-screen would be wrong not to think about how wonderfully right [Jackson] got so much of it," McKay continued. "But we're admirers from afar, that's it. The Rings Of Power doesn't try to compete with him."

J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy is set in the Third Age of Middle-earth with Prime's The Rings Of Power taking place in the Second Age. That's over 3,000 years between the two series, giving Amazon a serious buffer and its own place to tell the stories they want.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power starts streaming on September 2, exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.