Amazon announced Monday that it has secured a multi-season deal for a Lord of the Rings TV series. The show will focus on “new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring,” and includes rights for possible spin-offs. The series will be produced with cooperation by a who-who of those with Lord of the Rings rights, including the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins and New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Amazon Prime heads to Middle Earth. https://t.co/QowUmf8t3S pic.twitter.com/YVciEX3u2t

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 13, 2017

Middle Earth

Amazon didn’t specify where the “new storylines” will come from. Tolkien famously left a vast wealth of pre-history for The Lord of the Rings, some 10,000 years of fully documented history. Certainly that includes many stories in the months and years leading up to The Lord of the Rings. Personally, I hope Amazon Studies plans to limit itself to those storylines created by Tolkien, but somehow I doubt it.

The Lord of the Rings has generated some $6 billion in worldwide revenues with the Peter Jackson films, as the world has loved seeing these stories brought to the screen. My guess is that Amazon will have a hit on its hands with its TV show(s), too, and I wonder if Apple was in the bidding for this project.