The Lord of the Rings trilogy earned widespread critical acclaimed, countless awards, and close to $3 billion at the worldwide box office. While The Hobbit movies weren't quite as warmly received, they were equally as successful and served as a nice reminder that Middle-earth is a one-of-a-kind cinematic landscape that filmmaker Peter Jackson made entirely his own.
Now, though, J. R. R. Tolkien's work is being adapted for streaming, with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power less than two months away from premiering on Prime Video.
Amazon has spent a lot of money on the series, and if this week's trailer is any indication, it looks set to rival the scope of what we've seen from this world in theaters. But can what you watch at home on your TV or, dare we say it, phone, really rival what Jackson delivered once upon a time?
Earlier this week, we spoke with Dominic Monaghan about his new projects Moonhaven and Moriarty: The Devil's Game. We'll bring you more on those projects soon, but we also took this chance to ask the actor - who played Merry in The Lord of the Rings movies - what he thinks about a cinematic franchise making the leap to a small screen streaming platform.
"I think it’s fine! You know, that’s where the whole way we get our content is going," the actor says in the video above. "I think if you tried to make the Peter Jackson series of films now with some of them pushing into three hours and twenty minutes for the extended editions, people would say, ‘We can’t do that. We don’t have the bandwidth.’"
"Nowadays, I think people want slightly more bitesize chunks of their content. I’m the same! It’s great to watch creatives handle that world in a different way and I wish them luck with it," Monaghan continued. "I’m sure I’ll be watching it and talking about it on my podcast with Billy Boyd that I do."
It's definitely interesting to hear the perspective of someone who worked on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and we'll be keeping a close eye on Dominic and Billy's podcast, The Friendship Onion, for their take on The Rings of Power once it launches.
If the past few years have proven anything, it's that what we see on streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video can rival the visuals once only seen on the big screen. With that in mind, we're optimistic that this TV series can do the franchise justice (it's still hard not to wish that Jackson was somehow involved from a creative standpoint, though).
How do you feel about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power taking this franchise to streaming?