Season 2 of ‘The Rings of Power’ premiered recently and effectively laid the groundwork for the themes of the new season. We’ve witnessed Sauron beginning to corrupt Celebrimbor, the gradual downfall of the Dwarves, and gained more context about the Orcs in Middle-Earth, which heavily departed from the established lore. Meanwhile, Galadriel is evolving from a reckless warrior into a more contemplative character.

While the show was initially praised by critics and early reactions showed improvement when compared to the first season, we couldn’t help but notice one worrying trend that continued from the early days of the show – blatant disrespect of the source material.

It seems that fans are rapidly losing interest in the show, as we reported earlier the first numbers for the second season are here and they spell trouble for the potential future of the show. According to Deadline, Samba TV data shows that 1.8 million U.S. households watched the first episode of ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 1 within three days of its release on Prime Video. In contrast, Season 2 attracted just 902,000 U.S. households for its first episode within four days of its debut.

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the budget for the show was a bit smaller. The first season of ‘The Rings of Power’ cost a record-breaking $465 million, making it the most expensive television series ever produced. This amount does not include the $250 million Amazon paid for the rights to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. The exact numbers on how much the second season has cost were not revealed yet, but there’s no technical difference when it comes to two seasons so we can assume that the budget is more or less the same. Amazon acquired the television rights for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ from the Tolkien Estate in November 2017, committing to a five-season production valued at a minimum of $1 billion, so this should tell you enough.

Now the lower viewership might be related to overall much smaller marketing efforts, as the marketing for season 1 was massive, still, fan reactions online tell us a different story. ‘The Rings of Power’ now looks like it’s going to face the same fate as ‘The Acolyte’ which had low viewership, poor reception, and an astronomical budget, which ultimately led to its cancellation.

Canceling ‘The Rings of Power’ might be complicated, since as I’ve already mentioned the plan was to make 5 seasons originally, but the best they can do is reboot the show with writers and crew that are actually fans of the source material, and that won’t “enrich” the themes of the show with themes that are the completely and utterly polar opposite of what Tolkien imagined.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!