Will Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power be a platinum selling blockbuster?

For anyone wondering what an £850 million windfall might buy, streaming service Amazon may well have the answer – but only time will tell if the biggest gamble in their 28-year history pays off. 

With close to a billion spent on visual effects, casting, costumes and location shoots, the eagerly anticipated Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power – a prequel to Peter Jackson’s hugely popular film franchise –  is set to launch on September 1, making it the most expensive TV show of all time. 

It will herald a Middle-Earth set more than a 2000 years before Frodo Baggins’ fabled journey from The Shire, with a new range of characters inhabiting a world centuries before the comparatively civilised settings laid out in author JRR Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit and his subsequent Lord Of The Rings trilogy – The Fellowship Of The Ring, The Two Towers and Return Of The King. 

Unlike the broad landscape of source material plundered by Jackson in his film adaptations of Tolkien’s work, producers J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have created a potential – and highly ambitious – five season run based entirely on the author’s original appendices and footnotes. 

Quite a challenge, but with an enormous outlay from the Jeff Bezos managed Amazon – whose decision to own the book rights alone cost a staggering $250 million – the previously unseen second age of Middle Earth has been lovingly created, and with it the introduction of dark lord Sauron and the forging of the Rings Of Power. 

But what else can fans expect from a series upon which the future of a multi-billion company may well hinge? Well, not much in terms of familiarity – with Sir Lenny Henry the only instantly recognisable actor among a cast of comparative unknowns. 

The actor and comedian, whose career began five decades ago in the anarchic, custard pie fueled Tiswas studio, will play Sadoc Burrows, a Harfoot elder described by Henry as “the traditional Tolkien little guy… the little people in this world provide comedy but also get to be incredibly brave”.

He will be joined by an ensemble cast hoping to establish themselves as household names over the coming weeks – among them Cynthia Addai-Robinson as Númenor Queen Regent Míriel, Robert Aramayo as the half-Elven Elrond, and Owain Arthur as Dwarven prince Durin IV. 

All change: It will herald a Middle-Earth set more than a 2000 years before Frodo Baggins’ fabled journey from The Shire, with a new range of characters inhabiting a world centuries before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings 

Galloping to success? Unlike the broad landscape of source material plundered by Peter Jackson in his film adaptations of Tolkien’s work, producers J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have created a five season run based entirely on the author’s original appendices and footnotes (pictured: Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Lloyd Owen as Elendil)

Taking another of the show’s more significant roles, Morfydd Clark will play Elven warrior Galadriel, and she admits it gave her the opportunity to explore stunts that show off the power of her character behind the backdrop of a historically male-dominated society.

She told Press Association: ‘Gender just isn’t the same in Middle-earth in that I’m playing a character who can physically take down any man around her. It was really interesting to try to embody someone with a huge amount of physical strength.’ 

Co-executive producer Patrick McKay said Tolkien has had “some of the greatest female characters in literature” and Galadriel was one of the first characters the creators thought about for the new story.

‘Imagining what her world was like and what she might have been struggling with from clues throughout the text was really a joy,’ he explained.

Exciting: The hour-long episodes are understood to be stuffed with action and humour, but the first 50-hours will be used to to explore the show’s nuanced characters and complex histories (pictured: Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Charlie Vickers as Halbrand) 

The old enemy: There will be plenty of Orks on show in the new series, but at £850million is it too much of a gamble for the Jeff Bezos owned Amazon?

New star: Spanish actor will be hoping to make a name for himself as the half-Elven Elrond (pictured) in Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power 

The series is based, albeit loosely, on Tolkien´s writings and asides about Middle-earth´s Second Age, which preceded the Third Age´s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films and books, with the late author’s own grandson, Simon Tolkien, serving as a creative consultant.

‘We say Tolkien sort of left a series of stars in the sky. Our job was to connect the dots and form the constellation and then sort of draw in between the constellations to give a little more specificity to it,’  said showrunner and executive producer Payne. 

The hour-long episodes are understood to be stuffed with action and humour, but Payne and McKay plan to use a 50-hour canvas to explore their nuanced characters and complex histories, with the first eight episodes acting as an appetiser of sorts. 

New role: Welsh star Owain Arthur will play Dwarven prince Durin IV (pictured) in the new show, the most expensive of all time

Early episodes shift across the various regions of Middle-Earth, our planet’s imagined mythological past. Here, elves are involved with royal intrigue, dwarves mine inside mountains, hobbitlike harfoots live pastoral lives and humans seem unusually prone to violence.

Despite being set centuries before the books and films that make up the Tolkien’s canon, fans of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ will notice some familiar characters, based on the long lifespan of some of the creatures, including Galadriel, Elrond and Isildur. Sauron, the evil force, is unseen in the first two episodes but a malevolent presence throughout.