Latest news with #RingsOfPower
Geek Tyrant
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
THE RINGS OF POWER Season 3 Casts Three More as Production Kicks Off — GeekTyrant
Production on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 3 is officially underway, and with it comes a fresh wave of casting announcements. Prime Video confirmed that Andrew Richardson ( Ponies ) has joined the sprawling fantasy series as a series regular, with Zubin Varla ( Andor ) and Adam Young ( Masters of the Air ) set to recur. The trio are stepping into the epic just as cameras start rolling at the show's new production home: Shepperton Studios in the U.K. This is the third location for the series, which debuted in New Zealand and shot its second season at Bray Film Studios. Details about the characters remain under wraps. However, speculation is already circulating that Richardson might be playing a new character described earlier in casting calls as a young sea captain in his 20s. No confirmation yet, but fans are already drawing lines between Richardson's casting and that mysterious maritime role. Varla, interestingly, is not completely new to The Rings of Power . He did voice work in three episodes of Season 2, which could either be a setup for his live-action appearance or something else entirely. These additions follow earlier Season 3 casting reveals, includin g Stranger Things alum Jamie Campbell Bower, who joins as a series regular, and Eddie Marsan, who will recur. Bower's character has been described as a 'handsome high-born knight,' while Marsan's is said to be 'boisterous and boorish,' with a Scottish accent and a brother, which fans suspect could tie him to Prince Durin's family tree. J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay return as showrunners and executive producers, director Charlotte Brändström, who directs Season 3 episodes alongside Sanaa Hamri and Stefan Schwartz. The synopsis for Season 3 reads: "Jumping forward several years from the events of season 2, season 3 takes place at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the One Ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war and conquer all Middle-earth at last." The series takes place 'thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien's pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. 'Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. 'From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.' In Season 2, 'Sauron has returned. Cast out by Galadriel, without army or ally, the rising Dark Lord must now rely on his own cunning to rebuild his strength and oversee the creation of the Rings of Power, which will allow him to bind all the peoples of Middle-earth to his sinister will. 'Building on Season 1's epic scope and ambition, Season 2 of Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power plunges even its most beloved and vulnerable characters into a rising tide of darkness, challenging each to find their place in a world that is increasingly on the brink of calamity. 'Elves and dwarves, orcs and men, wizards and Harfoots… as friendships are strained and kingdoms begin to fracture, the forces of good will struggle ever more valiantly to hold on to what matters to them most of all… each other.'
CTV News
3 days ago
- Business
- CTV News
Amazon CEO Jassy says AI will reduce its corporate workforce in the next few years
Andy Jassy, Amazon president and CEO, attends the premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" at The Culver Studios on Monday, Aug. 15, 2022, in Culver City, Calif parts of its business, shuttering stores and slashing 29,000 jobs in an effort to reduce costs. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) Amazon CEO Andy Jassy anticipates generative artificial intelligence will reduce its corporate workforce in the next few years as the online giant begins to increase its usage of the technology. 'We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,' Jassy said in a message to employees. 'It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.' The executive said that Amazon has more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure is a 'small fraction' of what it plans to build. Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the e-commerce company's AI plans. 'As we go through this transformation together, be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team's brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams,' he said. Earlier this month Amazon announced that it was planning to invest $10 billion toward building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about $10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it ramps up its infrastructure to compete with other tech giants to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence products. The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has meanwhile fueled demand for energy-hungry data centers that need power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment and cooling systems. Amazon said earlier this month that it will spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania. In March Amazon began testing artificial intelligence-aided dubbing for select movies and shows offered on its Prime streaming service. A month earlier, the company rolled out a generative-AI infused Alexa. Amazon has also invested more heavily in AI. In November the company said that it was investing an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. Two months earlier chipmaker Intel said that its foundry business would make some custom artificial intelligence chips for Amazon Web Services, which is Amazon's cloud computing unit and a main driver of its artificial intelligence ambitions. Michelle Chapman, The Associated Press
Forbes
05-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Netflix Should Pick Up ‘The Wheel Of Time' After Amazon Cancels Its Best Live-Action Fantasy Show
Wheel Of Time It's been a tough run for fantasy shows lately. Ever since the massive popularity of Game Of Thrones, streaming services have been trying – and failing – to replicate that success. Amazon tried with two big-budget fantasy series: The Rings Of Power and The Wheel Of Time. The latter was killed so the former could live on, though many fans wonder why the better of the two was cancelled while the execrable Rings Of Power was given yet another season. One notable fan who publicly questioned the cancellation is Brandon Sanderson, who penned the final three books in Robert Jordan's fantasy series. 'I do think it's a shame," the author said in a comment on his YouTube channel, "as while I had my problems with the show, it had a fanbase who deserved better than a cancelation after the best season. I won't miss being largely ignored; they wanted my name on it for legitimacy, but not to involve me in any meaningful way.' I couldn't agree more. While the show made some pretty major departures from the source material, and while there is no doubt it got off to an incredibly rough start, Season 3 was easily the best of the bunch and it was clear that the creators and cast were finally finding their feet. As I noted in a previous post, the show deserves another season – warts and all – because it is currently not just the best live-action fantasy series on Prime Video, but really the only major live-action fantasy series worth watching these days. Indeed, unless the new HBO Harry Potter series can save fantasy, things are looking pretty grim for the genre. House Of The Dragon certainly isn't sitting well with fans after its disappointing second season. Television was the best hope for epic fantasy on screen, as outside of a few diamonds in the rough (Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy, for instance, or Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) there are few fantasy films worth taking seriously. As with other major cancellations of TV shows that deserved better, the hope from fans is less that Amazon will reconsider and more that some other streamer might pick up the show and give it new life. I said much the same thing when HBO canned the excellent – if incredibly bizarre – sci-fi series Raised By Wolves. Netflix has had terrible luck in its attempt to create its own Game Of Thrones, with series like Shadow & Bone not making much of a splash before their own untimely demise, and The Witcher fizzling out after a strong first season. And while it has projects in the works, like its Narnia films, there really isn't much to show for the company's investment in fantasy. A smart move would be to pick up The Wheel Of Time and give it a second chance at the biggest streamer out there. There's a baked-in audience. The cast and crew is already in place. Such a move is not unheard of, after all. Amazon saved The Expanse from an early grave, much to the delight of fans. That ended up being one of the most popular sci-fi series of all time. Netflix certainly has the cash to acquire the rights and it would earn a huge PR victory in the process. Over 124,000 fans have already signed a petition to save the show, and I suspect quite a few would happily fork over the cash for a Netflix subscription if the streamer made the move. It might be pie-in-the-sky thinking, but I genuinely believe that Wheel Of Time on Netflix makes sense, and would give the streamer the premium fantasy series its been hoping for all these years, while taking a feather from Amazon's cap in the process. That's basically two wins for the price of one. Of course, I will beat the animated fantasy series drum once more and just urge more streamers to consider animated adaptations of fantasy epics going forward. I'd love an animated Lord Of The Rings series or a show based on Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. Hell, I'd love to see an animated reboot of The Walking Dead. For now, it's just hope. But rebellions are built on hope.
Telegraph
29-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Amazon has killed the wrong ludicrously expensive fantasy show
Abandon all spoke – The Wheel of Time has shuddered to a premature halt. After three seasons of sorcerous derring-do, Amazon has put the brakes on its $18 million-per-episode, Rosamund Pike-fronted adaptation of Robert Jordan's fantasy saga. The original novels run to 14 volumes. Prime Video made it through the first four and a bit. It's like pulling the plug on Lord of the Rings before second breakfast or killing off James Bond when he'd just only parked himself at the roulette table. To WoT's considerable fanbase, the cancellation is a huge injustice (an online petition is, of course, already up and running). But in one sense, Prime's instincts were absolutely correct. It's about time the streamer pulled the plug on a mega-budget fantasy series that blatantly attempts to be the new Game of Thrones and is based on a beloved source material. The only error is that it flushed the wrong franchise away. The obvious candidate for cancellation is Middle-earth prequel show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Not only because it's terrible – its mishmash of awful wigs and even worse dialogue an insult to JRR Tolkien's meticulous world-building. More than that, the series has become a dead weight around the neck of Amazon – demonstrating the folly billionaires such as company founder Jeff Bezos can wreak with an unlimited budget and the conviction fantasy fans will swallow any tosh so long as it comes with wobbly prosthetic elf ears. Bezos has been criticised for firing Katy Perry into high orbit on his Blue Origin rocket. But if anything deserves to be blasted into deep space, it's the appalling Rings Of Power – which comes with a mind-bending per-episode budget of between $60 - $100 million (depending on whether you factor in the $250 million Amazon paid at the outset for the right to make merry in Middle-earth). In the case of Wheel of Time, the sheer amount of story to get through meant there was always a danger it would be killed off early. However, while the threat of cancellation was ever-present, the decision is widely understood to be related to the departure in March of Prime studio head Jennifer Salke. She had presided over a string of disasters, including Rings of Power and dead-on-arrival espionage series Citadel (a $1 billion budget and no viewers). With a track record like that, Prime was believed to have had misgivings about putting her in charge of James Bond after acquiring creative control of 007 from Eon Productions. Even by the standards of a mega corporation such as Amazon, Wheel of Time was a vast undertaking. In 2019, the company commenced building from scratch a full-scale town on a dedicated site 25 miles outside Prague. It was to serve as a base for a production that, all going well, would run for a decade (all did not go well). Pike – who played Gandalf-esque wizard Moiraine– had moved the Central Europe with her partner and children and expected to be there for the foreseeable. As co-producer on the show, she went all in on the Wheel of Time universe, even narrating several of the tie-in audiobooks (volume one, The Eye of the World, has a run time of 32 hours). She was joined by a cast of literally hundreds. There were grand battles involving a mind-boggling 3,500 FX shots in series one alone (1,000 more than in Marvel's Endgame) and a globe-hopping schedule, that took in Morocco, Italy, South Africa and the Canary Islands. In all, nearly 1,000 people are thought to have worked on the production – comparable to a large scale Hollywood movie. It was much better than Rings of Power too. Moiraine headed a solid cast that also included Peaky Blinders actress Natasha O'Keefe as a vengeful demon. The fight scenes were inventive, spectacularly violent and visually dazzling. Crucially, everything made sense – in contrast to Rings Of Power, which implied an absurd sexual chemistry between elf Queen Galadriel and the wicked Sauron. Compared to some of Jennifer Salke's more prominent flops, Wheel of Time was by no means a calamity. Reviews for series three were positive; ratings were solid. The sub-par production values and fake-looking costumes that had hobbled season one had been put right, too. But WoT was perceived as one of Salke's projects and news that it has been cast into the void is not surprising. The oliphaunt in the room is that fantasy is no longer a voguish genre. Amazon had acquired the rights to Wheel of Time after Jeff Bezos commanded underlings to present him with a project that had the potential to become the new Game of Thrones (the studio made its bid for Lord of the Rings around the same time). Going on for a decade later, Succession and The White Lotus have put eat-the-rich style social satire at the top of the Hollywood want list (see Julianne Moore's new Netflix project, Sirens). Long-haired weirdos running around in capes babbling about the Dark One simply doesn't cut it – especially not when each episode costs the best part of $20 million. Where does that leave Rings of Power? The show has been consistently dire, featuring cheap-looking sets, cheesy dialogue and – for reasons best known to the producers – a tribe of hobbit ancestors who sounded like 'thick Irish builders' from a 1970s sitcom. Horrific on every level, its trajectory has been the opposite of that of Wheel of Time, which slowly built a loyal audience (though viewership admittedly fell off from season one to two). In the case of Rings of Power, just one-third of viewers finished the first series, while audiences fell by half in year two. Why not cancel? The depressing answer is, as part of the rights deal, Prime Video is committed to making five seasons. Which means three more years of TV torture – for them and us. In a grim snapshot of television in 2025, a well-made (and much cheaper) show such as Wheel of Time is pitched into oblivion while the atrocious RoP gets to clop off into the sunset, scorned by practically everyone except the great unblinking eye of Jeff Bezos. It is a bleak end to a cautionary tale. One that, in years to come, is likely to be seen as a warning against Hollywood hubris and the dangers of throwing too much money at a billionaire's pipe dream.
Forbes
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Why Did Amazon Just Cancel A 97% Scored Prime Video Show?
The Wheel of Time Amazon Streaming services work in mysterious ways, and it was indeed pretty stunning on Friday when it was announced that Amazon Prime Video's The Wheel of Time was canceled, and would not be returning for a fourth season. The show had just seemed to find its groove. Season 1 had an 81% score and season 2 had an 86% score, but season 3? A stellar 97% critic score which you rarely see, especially on Amazon. So what happened here? A few things, supposedly: The Wheel of Time Rotten Tomatoes In a now poorly aged article, I wrote that there shouldn't be much to worry about in terms of the series getting a fourth season. Part of that was based on the confidence of the cast and showrunner. Here's Josha Stradowski (Rand al'Thor) last month: Then Rafe Judkins on his conversations with Amazon: Fans began to panic in recent weeks as cast members and the showrunner started sharing a fan-created 'renew Wheel of Time' petition for season 4, implying they too were not worried about it. It turns out everyone was right to worry, as here we are. It's frustrating for fans because Amazon is also airing The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, its billion-dollar fantasy series that has had a lukewarm reception and its viewership reportedly dropped by half from season 1 to season 2. It was renewed for season 3, albeit this cancellation of a high-budget family show does raise questions about whether Rings of Power will be able to get to its supposed five-season plan. So, Wheel of Time fans are sad, book-readers who didn't like the adaption didn't care, but with a stellar third season, I'd consider this a tragedy. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
