(ANSA-AFP) - ROME, JUL 23 - Nomadic hobbits, bearded dwarfs, elfiridotti in slavery: at the Comic-Con in San Diego the curtain has risen on the highly anticipated Amazon series 'The Lord of the Rings - The Rings of Power', which will bring heroic Second Age legends of Middle Earth history to the screens for the first time, recounting events that unfold thousands of years earlier than J.RR Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
The epic drama will be available exclusively on Prime Video in over 240 countries and territories worldwide in various languages from Friday 2 September.
For the ambitious saga - for which Amazon shelled out $ 250 million five years ago - fans lined up overnight to watch the unveiling of an exclusive trailer and preview several scenes from the series, presented by comedian Stephen. Colbert, a great fan of Tolkien.
"As fans, viewers and lovers of Middle-earth and Tolkien we didn't want to do a side thing, or a spin off, or the origin story of something else," said co-creator Patrick McKay.
"We wanted to make a huge Tolkien mega-epic. And Amazon was, wonderfully, crazy enough to say 'yes, let's do it.'"
The platform - it was explained - will invest over 1 billion dollars to create five seasons, each lasting 10 hours.
The younger versions of the elves Galadriel and Elrond - characters familiar to fans of Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning The Lord of the Rings trilogy - will be played by MorfyddClark and Robert Aramayo.
But with the new show set 4,000 years before Jackson's trilogy, in a fictional 'Second Age' - a historical period less detailed in Tolkien's writings - the creators had the ability to create many new characters.
"The field was wide open," said co-creator JD Payne.
The series is said to be a personal obsession of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and represents the biggest feat for the company in the streaming war with rivals from the likes of Netflix and Disney +.
(ANSA-AFP).
