The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is an upcoming American fantasy television series based on The Lord of the Rings and appendices by J. R. R. Tolkien. Developed by J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay for the streaming service Amazon Prime Video, the series is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It is produced by Amazon Studios in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema, with Payne and McKay serving as showrunners.

Amazon Studios bought the television rights for The Lord of the Rings for US$250 million in November 2017, making a five-season production commitment worth at least US$1 billion. This would make it the most expensive television series ever made. Payne and McKay were hired in July 2018, with the rest of the creative team publicly revealed a year later. The series is primarily based on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, which include discussion of the Second Age, and it features a large, diverse cast from around the world. For legal reasons, despite having the involvement of New Line Cinema, it is not a direct continuation of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies, but the production intended to evoke the films with similar production design and younger versions of characters who appear in them. Filming for the first eight-episode season took place in New Zealand, where the films were produced, from February 2020 to August 2021, with a production break of several months during that time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The season is scheduled to premiere on Prime Video on September 2, 2022.

In August 2021, Amazon Studios announced that production for future seasons would take place in the United Kingdom. Filming for the second season is expected to begin by mid-2022.