'The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power' Showrunner Says He's Already Working On Season 3 Despite Not Having An Official Renewal
'The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power' Showrunner Says He's Already Working On Season 3 Despite Not Having An Official Renewal
Patrick McKay, one of the showrunners on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power claims that he and his team are indeed working on a third season already despite not receiving an official greenlight from Amazon MGM Studios.
During an interview with YouTube channel Rings and Realms, McKay stated, “We’re writing Season 3 and there’s a lot happening in Númenor.”
However, despite McKay claiming he and his fellow showrunner J.D. Payne are working on a third season, Amazon MGM has not greenlit a third season yet.
In contrast, the show’s second season was greenlit three years before the first season even debuted a single episode.
Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva reported back in 2019 that Amazon Studios had greenlit a second season. She said, “As pre-production on Amazon Studios’ high-profile Lord Of the Rings TV series is gearing up in New Zealand, the streamer is moving ahead with an early Season 2 renewal for the sprawling adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels.”
The second season aired its final episode on October 3rd, meaning that it’s been over a month without an official greenlit.
Furthermore, Amazon MGM Studios boss Jennifer Salke claimed in an interview with Variety back on October 10th that Amazon was not wavering from its 50-episode commitment.
She said, “I don’t think so. [That] commitment is never the thing that’s driving what we’re doing. We’ll continue to make the show as long as we see global customers loving it and watching it to the point where — it is a business. Obviously, we need a large amount of people showing up. And there are a large amount of people, so there’s no debate about whether or not the show will continue.”
READ: Comedian Patton Oswalt Stans For Rings Of Power With Bizarre Tweet Praising The Humanizing Of Orcs
However, the numbers from multiple data analytics companies don’t back that up. First, Samba TV reported that viewership in the United States declined by nearly 50% for the Season 2 premiere.
It reported in September 2022 that the show’s Season 1 premiere attracted 1.8 million U.S. households.
At the beginning of September following the Season 2 premiere it reported that only 902,000 U.S. households watched. That’s a decline of 49.8%.
It was not just Samba TV either. Nielsen reported back in 2022 that the show’s two-episode premiere raked in 1.253 billion minutes watched.
With the Season 2 three-episode premiere it only brought in 1.015 billion minutes watched.
If you do a simple calculation where you divide the total minutes watched by the total run time, it gives you 9.4 million for the first season and 4.9 million views for the second season. That’s a decline of 47%.
That trend continued with the season finales as well. As NotItsKnown on X reports, the week the Season 2 finale aired saw the show’s total minutes only bring in about half of the week when the Season 1 finale aired.
The Season 1 finale brought in 1.137 billion minutes watched while the Season 2 finale only did 527 million minutes watched. That’s a decline of 53.6%.
READ: Disney Canceled Star Wars: The Acolyte And Woke Activists Are Going Insane
Of note, those viewership numbers are on par with Lucasfilm’s The Acolyte that was scrapped after its first season due to poor viewership. Nielsen reported that the week the show’s finale aired it only brought in 335 million minutes watched. If you do a simple run-time calculation that comes to around 6.8 million views given the final episode had a run time of 49 minutes.
The Rings of Power Season 2 finale did marginally better. A simple run time calculation for the week of its finale comes out to 7.12 million views given its finale had a run time of 74 minutes.
X user LostHistory9 speculates that the reason Amazon MGM Studios have not greenlight a third season for The Rings of Power is because the company is “trying to avoid Acolyte-esque blowback from the activists that pretend to enjoy Rings of Stupid.”
What do you make of the fact that a third season for the show has not been greenlit yet? Join as a paid subscriber to support Fandom Pulse and our journalism, and leave a comment.
For a great alternative to mainstream publishing, with sci-fi spy thriller action, read The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle on Amazon!