Prime Video returned to Middle-earth August 29, with a three-episode drop ushering in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two. Marketing for the new season played up how action-packed it would be, an important quality to highlight after complaints about season one‘s glacial pacing. It also stirred up excitement by teasing the introduction of fan-favorite Tolkien character Tom Bombadil. But the first viewing numbers are here, and they suggest maybe Amazon still has some work to do.
Variety reports that season two of the series, which is set thousands of years before the more familiar events of The Lord of the Rings but features a few repeat characters, “has reached 40 million viewers globally in 11 days.” This data comes from Amazon—but the trade notes that contextualizing these numbers is not as simple as it seems, because “Amazon has not defined how it quantifies its viewership; for example, 40 million could simply be the number of people who watched any portion of the available episodes.”
This is important because one of the pieces of viewership information that emerged after season one was that while a lot of folks started watching Rings of Power, far fewer actually watched through the season one finale, which also happened to be the episode in which the titular rings were finally being forged. In April 2023, the Hollywood Reporter noted that a mere 37 percent of Rings of Power viewers in the U.S. actually finished watching all eight episodes. That’s a pretty dismal completion rate, especially for a show with a reportedly nearly half-billion-dollar budget. (In that same 2023 article, THR wrote that Rings of Power is “believed to be the most expensive series ever made.”)
And while 40 million viewers in 11 days sounds like a robust turnout, it’s not quite as magical when you consider that season one had 25 million viewers in a single day, when it premiered its first two episodes to critical acclaim on September 1, 2022. Just for comparison: another high-profile Prime Video series, video game adaptation Fallout, debuted earlier in 2024 with a binge drop (as opposed to Rings of Power’s weekly rollout), and scored 65 million global viewers in its first 16 days.
Still, Amazon remains optimistic about its time in Middle-earth; it even seems some viewers are playing catch-up with those season one episodes they might’ve missed. A staff memo from Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke shared by Variety reads in part: “Through the second weekend of [Rings of Power] launch, according to our key measures, the series is showing that we have another huge hit season on our hands as 40 million viewers have already watched [season two]. We’ve also observed that tens of millions of viewers have watched [season one] since early August. We’ve seen an impressive amount of our Rings of Power customers coming from outside of the U.S., which is a testament to the show’s resonance with global audiences and the remarkable growth of Prime Video customers worldwide.”
New episodes of Rings of Power season two—which will again run for eight installments—arrive Thursdays on Prime Video.
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