The Lord of the Rings series headed to Amazon is still a ways off, but it seems Amazon Prime has already renewed the show for season two.
Right now, the details we have about Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings series is still pretty sparse. With the exception of casting details (which haven’t been officially confirmed by Amazon) and the knowledge that the show takes place during the Second Age, the show is still shrouded under a fair bit of secrecy.
However, despite the fact that the public is still largely in the dark about the show, and despite the premiere still being a ways away, Deadline reports that Amazon has renewed the show for a second season and set the show’s initial hiatus as well. The writers’ room has been reassembled, and they are hard at work on the second season. Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, confirmed to Deadline at the company’s holiday party that work on season 2 had officially started.
While it’s exciting for Lord of the Rings fans to know that they’ll at least have two seasons of this new show to look forward to, it could also mean a shorter hiatus break between the two seasons.
The team behind the Lord of the Rings show will take a four to five-month break after filming the show’s first two episodes. During that time, the writing team will map out and write the show’s second season.
It’s not unusual for a show that got a straight-to-series order to go on a brief hiatus after filming the first couple episodes so the showrunners and writers have a chance to evaluate the direction of the series. However, the Lord of the Rings team is planning on taking a hiatus that is much longer than the norm to gear up for both seasons of the show.
This means that once the break is over, the team will have season two scripts ready to go, which is good for the fans because it opens up the possibility of shooting some season two footage while shooting season one, or even allowing a back-to-back shoot of both seasons; a strategy employed by Peter Jackson’s in his Lord of the Rings movies.
We’ll be excited to see how this early renewal impacts production and the release dates of the first two seasons of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series. Thankfully, with the first season’s production gearing up, we should be getting more official LOTR news from Amazon soon.