Rings of Power
By far the most ambitious project in Amazon Prime Video’s history, if not in the entire streaming space, was the billion-dollar budget Lord of the Rings original series, Rings of Power, now in its second season. When Rings of Power was first reported to be in the works, it was assumed that the series was already planned for a five-year run.
As time went by, it seemed that this was no longer a guarantee. Season 2 was given the green light, but there was a large Decline in viewership based on data available to us via third-party estimates.
The numbers are simply terrible. Luminate, the company that estimates viewership, says Season 2 debuted after Netflix’s “Worst Ex Ever True Crime” series. But the details (via Variety):
- The 132-minute, two-episode premiere of the first season of “Rings of Power” on Labor Day generated 1.2 billion minutes of viewing in four days.
- The premiere of the second season of “Rings of Power” with three episodes and a total length of 204 minutes generated 553.5 million viewing minutes in the first four days.
That’s less than half even if you were to watch a whole extra episode, and reports from other companies like Samba suggest similar numbers (1.8 million households for Season 1, down to 900,000 for Season 2), although Amazon itself doesn’t release that data, except on its own top 10 list, where the series currently sits ahead of The Boys, whose fourth season ended in mid-July.
The Rings of Power
To be clear, this is not normal. Even if you don’t expect Game of Thrones to see a year-on-year increase, House of the Dragon’s viewership, which also dropped somewhat this year, is only down about 15%.
I’m not sure Amazon is ready to fully commit to this five-season plan. The first season Was the most-watched premiere in Prime Video’s history. But if those numbers continue to plummet, is it worth continuing for another three years rather than ending early?
It’s not that Amazon Prime Video is lacking hits. The series hit a home run with The Boys and even created an effective spin-off with Gen V. Reacher is huge (literally) and one of the most consistent hits on the charts. Fallout debuted with enormous numbers, just behind Rings of Power itself, and received multiple Emmy nominations. But RoP? Interest in it is rapidly declining, and it’s not clear how that could change in the next three years if that’s the trend we’re already seeing between the first two seasons.
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