With so much money and manpower going into the series, what story are they going to tell?
While fans are used to the stories of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," this time Amazon's narrative will be going much further afield... and further back in time, too.
The show will cover events that take place in the Second Age of Tolkien's world.
This is a roughly 3,500-year-long era that comes before the 3,000-year-long Third Age, which ends with the events of "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings." If 3,500 years feels like a very long span of time, that's because, well, it is.
In fact, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have already clarified that the biggest deviation from the text is the simple fact that they've condensed all of the events of the Second Age into a single point in time.
According to Payne, "We talked with the Tolkien estate... If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you're jumping 200 years in time, and then you're not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four."
Along with this major adjustment to the pace of the narrative, the showrunners have explained that they only have the rights to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit." However, this gives them critical access to the appendices of "The Return of the King," which includes a brief outline of events in the Second Age.
Working from this, they will try to bring together a coherent, condensed, and compelling Second Age narrative.
Everyone loves the Ents.
The tree-folk are a fan-favourite element of "The Lord of the Rings" story, and while they're certainly important in the Third Age, the events we see in "The Lord of the Rings" really amount to little more than a last hurrah for the group.
