The first season of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series was popular among fans on social media, with positive tweets outnumbering negative tweets more than 2-to-1, according to a new report.
Set thousands of years before the timeline in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power broke Amazon Prime streaming records when it launched Sept. 1. The final episode of Season 1 streamed last week.
The German website Wettfreunde.net analyzed 375,000 tweets to examine fans’ reactions to both Rings of Power and HBO’s House of the Dragon.
The analysis found that 47.3 percent of the tweets about Rings of Power were positive, 19.9 percent were negative, and 32.8 percent were neutral. The numbers for House of the Dragon were less impressive, with 35.3 percent of the tweets being positive, 17.7 percent negative, and 47 percent neutral.
The Twitter analysis also found that:
- the most-mentioned actor from the Rings of Power series was Morfydd Clark, who portrays Galadriel (30.7 percent of tweets mentioned her). Also popular were Lenny Henry (who portrays Sadoc Burrows) and Sophia Nomvete (who portrays Princess Disa), who were mentioned by 21 percent and 7.5 percent of tweets, respectively.
- the most-mentioned character was Galadriel (30.1 percent of tweets). Princess Disa (16.7 percent) and Elrond (11.1 percent) were the second- and third-most-mentioned characters, respectively.
Rings of Power is scheduled for five seasons and is based on the Tolkien books’ “appendices,” the information he placed in the back of the novels to set the background to his universe.
The head of Amazon Studios said earlier this year that the company was determined to make Rings of Power family-friendly.
“There’s so much darkness in the world. Leaning into light … was really appealing to everybody – bringing something to our global customer base that is hopeful and has light and that a family can watch,” Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, told Variety. “So many people have grown up with this literature, and we wanted this series to pay it forward for new generations of Tolkien lovers. The line we’ve been using is ‘If you’re old enough to read the books, you’re old enough to watch the show.’”
“We knew from the beginning that this was not our Game of Thrones,” she added, referencing the HBO series that is known for its sex and violence. “In fact, the fans spoke up from the minute the deal was closed, saying, ‘Please don’t try to insert sex and a level of provocative violence,’ things that don’t feel true to the stories that Tolkien wanted to tell.”
Related:
4 Things You Should Know about Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’
Photo courtesy: ©Unsplash/Ergo Zakki
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
