The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has scored a victory in the Nielsen SVOD charts over genre rival House of the Dragon.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, Prime Video's new mega-budget fantasy epic managed to capture a staggering 1.25 billion watch minutes in the wake of its premiere on Sep. 1. HBO's Game of Thrones prequel continued to score reasonably well, however, with a total of 781 million minutes watched on its Max streaming service. One caveat to this metric is that it does not include audience figures for those watching the series on HBO's traditional television service, a sizable portion of the overall viewership.
A Tolkien Adaptation's Journey
Translated into raw numbers of viewers, the figures also stack up well for Prime Video. Averaging at around 9.5 million viewers for the first two episodes, it beat out the likes of fellow Prime fantasy epic The Wheel of Time, which managed 6.6 million viewers across its initial three episodes. Another of Prime Video's most successful original series, Reacher, was only able to accumulate around half of the initial appeal of The Rings of Power, with 4.7 million people tuning in to watch the show on release.
It's not all good news for the streaming giant, though, as audience feedback on the latest outing for the works of Tolkien are decidedly mixed. Although critics' scores remain high at 84% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, the show's overall audience score sits at a mere 38%. Concerns over the perceived lack of connection to the original lore laid out by the author became so pronounced that showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne were forced to respond publicly. After a journalist at a Television Critic Association press event suggested as much, McKay responded, "We don't feel 'vaguely connected.' We feel deeply, deeply connected to those folks and work every day to be even closer connected. That's really how we think about it."
Additionally, extensive reports of racist trolling directed at some cast members led to an additional rebuttal from the show via a statement on Twitter. In it, many of those who worked on the show came out to defend cast members of color against the online abuse they were receiving upon the show's release.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes premiere every Thursday.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter