One of the most eye-catching moments of this year’s Super Bowl – alongside the all-time classic half-time show and cutaway shots to the mind-bogglingly massive, intestine-shaped “infinity screen” pulsing away at LA’s SoFi Stadium – was the first glimpse of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series. You may be aware of it, given it has been five years in the making and its first season cost a shade under the GDP of Tonga. Those who aren’t will surely be very soon, thanks to an exhaustive marketing blitz that will whirr for the next seven months until the show’s release.

The teaser trailer that launched at the Super Bowl was designed to be the centrepiece of this marketing campaign; a place in the most highly coveted advertising window on the planet, beamed into over 100m households in the US, as well as the rest of (Middle) Earth via YouTube. In terms of attracting eyeballs, Amazon’s gambit was a success: 257m people around the world watched the teaser in the first 24 hours after its release.

Dig a little deeper though – or rather scroll down to the comments section of that YouTube video – and things look dramatically less rosy. There you’ll find variations on the same Tolkien quote, posted over and over again, in Russian and Czech, Portuguese and Polish: “Evil is unable to create anything new. It can only distort and destroy what has been invented or created by the forces of good”. This “comment bomb” is designed to drown out any praise or even general discussion, and seems to have done the trick: at the time of writing, 68,000 people have commented on the video and pretty much all of them are that same damning quote. (Until recently they would largely have expressed their disappointment through the ‘dislike’ button, but YouTube no longer reveals the number of people who engage with its thumbs-down feature publicly.)

But just what are the commenters angry about? Amazon’s much-criticised labour practices, perhaps, or Jeff Bezos’ foray into billionaire space tourism? No, the complaints largely seem to be about the trailer itself: its gleaming CGI-ishness, changes to Tolkien’s original story, minor details to sigils, dwarves and the like and – most pointedly – the fact that it seems a pale imitation of Peter Jackson’s much loved (and still fairly recent in the memory) adaptation.

Such fan revolts seem to have become the norm in recent years, with releases that fail to live up to viewers’ lofty expectations leading to high-profile backlash. We’ve seen calls to reshoot anticlimactic endings of massive TV franchises. We’ve seen users bombard Rotten Tomatoes with negative film reviews. And we’ve seen a couple of fan revolts prove successful, with Paramount re-designing Sonic the Hedgehog to make him look less like a “nightmarish experiment in avant garde taxidermy”, and Warner Bros releasing the glowering four-hour ‘Snyder cut’ of Justice League as a corrective to Joss Whedon’s widely loathed version of the film.

Even so, this Lord of the Rings rebellion seems quite unprecedented. These fans – or at least a faction of them – seem to be rebelling against the entire product, something that feels far harder to correct than gussying up a misshapen hedgehog. Can Amazon win them back onside before September – or will LOTR be DOA?

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Source: The Guardian

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