THE LORD OF THE RINGS Star Bernard Hill Doesn't Think THE RINGS OF POWER Should Have Ever Happened

THE LORD OF THE RINGS Star Bernard Hill Doesn't Think THE RINGS OF POWER Should Have Ever Happened

Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been a hit with fans for the most part, but someone who isn't impressed by the small screen spin-off is King Théoden actor Bernard Hill...

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By JoshWilding - Dec 02, 2022 05:12 AM EST
Filed Under: Lord of the Rings
Source: Metro (via SFFGazette.com)

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been well-received by fans of Middle-earth since debuting on Prime Video, though the series certainly isn't without its detractors. While many of the actors who starred in the movies have shared supportive words for the small screen prequel, Bernard Hill isn't among them. 

The actor played King Théoden in Peter Jackson's movies, and when Metro (via SFFGazette.com) asked if he's watched the show, he snapped back with, "No, not interested. It’s a money-making venture and I’m not interested in watching that or being in it. Good luck to them and all that stuff but it’s not like the real thing."

The site would go on to ask whether Hill believes The Lord of the Rings franchise should have simply ended when Jackson's trilogy did, to which he responded: "Completely, yes."

"I think they were pushing it when they made 'The Hobbit.' 'The Hobbit’s' a tiny book," he added. "They did it well – they did it really, really well. They expanded it [but] I think you can only stretch a piece of elastic so far. I think they managed it in 'The Hobbit' because there were some really good things in 'The Hobbit' without a doubt.”

While the actor is very much entitled to his own opinion, the majority don't agree with his point of view. Despite some online trolling, The Rings of Power has been a hit; it's a good job too, especially as it's the most expensive TV show ever made. Amazon has plans for at least five seasons, meaning it will eventually be an investment of over $1 billion. 

The first season of the show concluded by revealing Sauron's true face, setting the stage for us to learn more about the iconic villain's origin story in the coming years. There are also rumblings about more movies, likely with different actors playing big-name characters like Aragorn and Gandalf (something we're sure Hill would be equally as displeased about). 

What's your take on these comments about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?

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IcePyke
IcePyke - 12/2/2022, 5:12 AM
Son of Thengel is right!

Westu Théoden hál!

DetectiveCinema
DetectiveCinema - 12/2/2022, 5:16 AM
Truer words have never been spoken.
bobevanz
bobevanz - 12/2/2022, 5:27 AM
I didn't even bother. I like a slow burn but when the whole season is a drag, somethings wrong
tmp3
tmp3 - 12/2/2022, 5:28 AM
saw the first 2 episodes and then forgot it even existed. great investment of $1 billion from bezos & co lol
Taonrey
Taonrey - 12/2/2022, 5:30 AM
@tmp3 - 1 billion? I’m guessing this is for multiple seasons?
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 5:45 AM
@tmp3 - It’s literally Amazon’s number one show in every single region around the world and has been viewed by over 100 million people. Yeah I would say it was a good investment.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 6:16 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - spent a billion, get 100 mil to watch.

Considering a month's membership to prime video is 8.99, that means it didn't even get its money back.
Fogs
Fogs - 12/2/2022, 6:24 AM
@tmp3 - It looks beautiful, but that's it.

It's insulting to even call it "inspired" by Tolkien.
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 6:34 AM
@Origame - Wow there is a lot of holes in that argument. Because the show aired for 2 months not 1 so that math alone is going to make it work out. But the show did not cost one billion dollars to make for one season, that figure includes what they paid for the rights for multiple seasons. And Amazon is playing a different game then every other streaming service. Someone signs up to watch Lord of the Rings on Prime and then starts to buy all their socks and batteries and toilet paper from Amazon then they are making a lot more than one monthly fee.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 6:45 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - so, it's not gonna start making money until season 2

Assuming people actually bother.

You do understand breaking even requires the show to make 2 bil right?
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 6:49 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - also no. The show was released over the course of a month and a half. This is standard with streaming services since it prevents someone using a free trial to watch the entire series. Anyone regularly watching the series would only pay for 1 month.
Toblakai
Toblakai - 12/2/2022, 7:41 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - it hadn't been viewed by 100 mill8on different people. Not even close. You need to actually educate yourself kn how Amazon calculated those views lol. Total sham.

And if this is your idea of a good investment I have some real estate deals I could hook you up with for a small fee.
Toblakai
Toblakai - 12/2/2022, 7:42 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - nobody signed up to Amazon because of Rings of Power lol.
CorndogBurglar
CorndogBurglar - 12/2/2022, 7:46 AM
@Origame - Figuring out how much money a streaming service makes is a tough thing. Saying that Prime Video charges $8.99 per customer every month, and 100 million people watched it doesn't really mean the show made $900 million. Realistically, it means it made far less than that.

Sure it means that 100 million are laying $8.99 a month. But how many of those people already had accounts for an extended period of time before that show launched? How many people just watched it because it something else to watch. How many of those people watched other shows or movies too?

See what I mean? How can one show be given the credit of earning the full $8.99 a month if that customer watched multiple shows? Maybe attribute a portion of the $8.99 to it? I don't know.

But streaming services are a tough thing. This is why Disney+ reported a $1.4 billion loss this year. In a year when a bunch of Marvel and Star Wars projects aired.
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 9:25 AM
@Toblakai - If you don’t think Amazon is making hand over fist then you know absolutely nothing about business. If you don’t think this show is going to be financially successful for them then you are just being willfully ignorant. This was clearly a big international hit. And you don’t even need that big of a number of subscribers to sign up and stayed signed up if a certain percentage of them start buying their toilet paper and paper towels and batteries from Amazon instead of Wal-mart or Kroger. Imagine how much they can make from one family’s Christmas shopping. There is a reason they are such a huge company. They know how to make money.
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 9:40 AM
@Origame - No, because that’s not how streaming works. Not for anyone but especially not for Amazon. And I hate to break it to you but there are lots of shows in the history of television that weren’t really profitable until season two or later. That’s kind of the nature of the beast. And the billion dollar figure is for the series. The first season including those massive rights is only 465 million so that would need to be the figure you would need to compare anyway.

I just think you guys have an awful lot of wishful thinking if you really believe that this won’t be a financially successful venture for Amazon.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 9:46 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - even by your logic, they would still need to spend about 465 mil for following seasons to keep up with the quality. And the series has been losing viewers all through this season.

Also, I really don't get what you mean by wishful thinking. It's objectively losing money.
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 9:57 AM
@Origame - It’s almost certainly not. But regardless you can’t know it is. You can’t know of the people who signed up or stayed signed up for Rings of Power, either in part or in whole, how much they spend on a monthly basis on T-shirts and books and soap. You can’t know how much they are spending on Christmas presents this year. All of that, all of it, is part of Amazon’s math to determine if it’s a financial successful enterprise for them. And they have charts and graphs and studies at the wazoo on those kinds of things and you aren’t privy to any of it so you just can’t make that declaration. And we are talking about a show that was in the top five of streaming shows for like it’s whole season. This show was watched. And it looks like it was bigger international hit than it was a domestic one.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 10:05 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - oh, so it's not about it logically being a success, but if Amazon views it as a success.

Also, by that same logic you can't know that either. But bare minimum, the series has been hemorrhaging views since the second episode. People aren't sticking with the series. So the only benefit is if they decided not to end their subscription after the trial.

And why are you simping so hard for this show?
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 10:35 AM
@Origame - Because I thought it was a really good show. Just like millions of people did. And it was not hemorrhaging viewers. According to Nielsen after the first week it lost about 1% a week. That’s not anyone’s definition of hemorrhaging. And interestingly “the show also saw a spike in demand following its Oct. 14 series finale. According to Parrot Analytics, there was an impressive 55.7 times increase in viewership, which was an all-time high viewership number for Season 1 of the show.” I mean it was literally the second most viewed streaming show it’s last week. It couldn’t have hemorrhaged that many viewers. It’s Amazon’s biggest hit ever. And there no difference between what is logically successful and what Amazon views as successful. You can just not like the show and that’s cool. But successful is successful.

And of course I can’t know those numbers either. But I know they aren’t zero. The only way we’ll know is if Amazon continues the show past season 2. According to how you put things I don’t know how any of these shows could be considered financially successful to you on any of these platforms. There is now was enough people signed up for Netflix to cover 200 million dollars for Red Notice but it’s getting a sequel. Doubtful many people signed up for Stranger Things Season 4 specifically. If you weren’t on board for seasons 1-3 then you weren’t just going to be moved by the very expensive season 4. Yet we are getting another season. You can’t view the value of a property to a streaming service in a simplistic fashion.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 11:49 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - ...it got a 39% audience score. They didn't like it.
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 6:46 PM
@Origame - Online audience reviews are about as useful as a boat full of holes. They are never actually representative of the actual audience because they are only sampling the type of people who would actually leave online reviews. But even if we took your number to be 100% true that still means over 40 million people liked the show…
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 6:50 PM
@TheUnworthyThor - 1) then you can't say the show was actually liked by people, for the same reasons.

2) yeah. 40 mil. Out of 100 mil. Why do you think it's good most don't like it?
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 7:18 PM
@Origame - I think I can say most people liked it because according to the actual information we have most people continued to watch the show. If only 39% likes the show then why wasn’t the drop off far higher? Why was it still beating all these other shows that were also streaming? Why did it beat every Amazon show ever?

And again 39% is completely and utterly untrustworthy. We see again and again these online reviews do not correlate with the number of people who actually watch shows. They are often times just an echo chamber for the type of internet user who feels super motivated to go around leaving those reviews. It’s like trying to base the general audience’s opinion on a comic book based upon the users of the site. We’re a bad sampling. Anyone by definition coming here is far more interested in superheroes than your average person. Still though 40 million people is a bigger audience than more than 99% of shows.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 7:23 PM
@TheUnworthyThor - 1) well after the second episode it dropped off by 20%. That's a huge drop off. Besides, if people generally liked it, why weren't they keeping views? Successful shows maintain views between episodes, or grow views as it goes.

2) in other words, you don't like that people don't like it so you disregard it.

You guys lost the whole "it's review bombing trolls" narrative after captain marvel audience reviews barely changed after the "trolls" were removed.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 7:25 PM
@TheUnworthyThor - and I'm sure those 40 million are gonna recoup the billion dollar cost amazon already spent on this show, as well as the extra money they will need to spend for additional seasons 🤣
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 7:57 PM
@Origame - @Origame - Really? Because Yellowstone, the number one show on television, lost over 25% of it’s audience since the big season 5 premiere. That’s just what happens to shows. The premiere is usually the biggest episode of the year, that’s when excitement and the advertising is at it’s highest, and then it settles into the people who will tune in weekly. And then the people who save them up and binge them come later. It just makes absolutely no sense if people hated it that much and it lost that much of it’s audience that it was still the number two showing on streaming by it’s finale.

I don’t give a crap if people don’t like it. If 60% of people don’t like it then they are completely free to stop watching the show and stop talking about it like normal people do when they don’t like a show. I’m not interested in trying to change their mind about the show. What I am interested in is dispelling the false narrative that some people who overly claim to hate the show put forth that it’s some kind of huge disaster and that everyone hated it despite the giant pile of evidence to the contrary.

They didn’t actually remove all the reviews. They added the verified audience reviews for new movies in the wake of Captain Marvel. Previous movies left with their unverified scores. Just watch when the score is much better for The Marvels. And Captain Marvel just proves what I’m talking about. Terrible online reviews but a good CinemaScore, great legs at the movie theater and over a billion dollars. By every other metric it’s a well liked movie except these useless online audience reviews. Meaning they are not at all actually reflective of the actual real world audience.
Origame
Origame - 12/2/2022, 8:26 PM
@TheUnworthyThor - so a series that's been going on for 5 years now lost viewers? Yeah, that's really a comparable situation to the big lord of the rings series amazon spent a billion dollars on🙄

Dude, you provided zero evidence people like it. In fact I've provided the evidence people hated it and you just raised your nose at it. Again, if you have evidence people actually like it, prove it. And really, you're gonna pull the "stop watching if you don't like it" card? That's the response desperate fanboys have when people don't like what they do because there's no winning. If they did stop watching, you'd argue they need to give the rest of the series a chance.

And of course they didn't remove all the reviews. Even rottentomatoes had to admit not all of those reviews were trolls. But they removed 10s of thousands of reviews, and the score only increased by a few percentage points.

And really? Cinemascore is the trusted source? Do you even know where they did the poles or the sample size? Also, metacritic lines up with rottentomatoes.
Toblakai
Toblakai - 12/6/2022, 9:04 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - nobody joined Amazon for this show, thus any money they make they were already going to make. It brought in very little new revenue and cost a ton of money, totally a net loss for Amazon. Luckily for them they can absorb a hit like that pretty easily.
Toblakai
Toblakai - 12/6/2022, 9:07 AM
@TheUnworthyThor - one very telling metric about whether or not this dumpster fire was like by fans is the fact that it was never even in the top 10 of pirated shows lol.

People didn't even want t to watch this garbage for free, much less sign up and pay for it.

House of the Dragons on the other hand was pirated like crazy.

If people won't even pirate your show....it's a pile of shit.
TheUnworthyThor
TheUnworthyThor - 12/2/2022, 5:38 AM
Any movie and any TV show beyond the level of student films and art projects are money making ventures. New Line wasn’t interested in a charity to make fans of the Lord of the Rings books happy, they wanted to make money. To ever describe anything in film and television as a money making venture or a cash grab is completely asinine because well yeah no shit.
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