The Real Cautionary Tale Rings Of Power Should Have Learned From Came From J.R.R. Tolkien Himself

Published Apr 11, 2026, 10:45 PM EDT

Angel Shaw is a Lead Writer and Critic on ScreenRant's TV team, covering new-release and classic TV shows across all major streaming platforms. She has been a writer with ScreenRant since 2022 and specializes in Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and fantasy. 

Angel holds a bachelor's degree in language interpreting and is passionate about all things culture and communication—especially in how it relates to popular media throughout history (from Shakespeare to Friends to Game of Thrones).

Rings of Power has been controversial since day one, and the loudest complaints revolve around book faithfulness. Prime Video has made many changes to Tolkien's Second Age timeline to fit everything into a linear TV show, but that's only the beginning. There have been several more creative liberties taken, each of which has been unpopular. Prime Video might have predicted this would happen had it paid attention to all those failed fantasy adaptations from yore. Still, that's not even the most obvious or important lesson Rings of Power could have learned.

Had Amazon taken a closer look at Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, it might have realized that its Second Age TV show runs significantly counter to the story's themes. After all, this is the most expensive fantasy TV show of all time, ironically based on a story that condemns greed, wealth, industrialization, corruption, and profligacy.

How Prime Video's Approach To Rings Of Power Contradicts The Lord Of The Rings' Themes

In The Lord of the Rings, the heroes are always the little guys, while the villains are the corrupt and power-hungry. Of course, this is often the case with any great story, but Tolkien took it further (and generally set the standard). Hobbits weren't just great little heroes. Their lifestyle stood in complete contrast to those who were more easily corrupted by evil. They value nature, hard work, and the small pleasures of life. They aren't generally greedy or squanderers, while powers like Saruman, especially, tended to hoard resources while searching for ways to capitalize on them.

The end of Tolkien's The Return of the King sees the Hobbits return to the Shire to find it industrialized by Saruman out of greed, and they have to fight to take it back. It was an additional storyline that provided a final emphasis on a key Lord of the Rings value—that the best lives are the simplest and least wasteful.

By the time Rings of Power's planned five seasons are complete, Prime Video is estimated to spend well over $1 billion on the whole thing. To put this into perspective, the entire Game of Thrones series is estimated to have cost just over $500 million. A common complaint regarding Rings of Power is that this money wasn't well spent. It's a beautiful show, to be sure, but all that spending just wasn't necessary. It's needlessly extravagant, which is truly ironic since the show adapts a story that is so firmly anti-profligacy.

As previously stated, Rings of Power was always going to be a rather big endeavor. Tolkien's Second Age of Middle-earth spanned over three thousand years, all defined by multiple wars and Sauron's rise to power with his One Ring. Bringing this to the screen would naturally cost a fortune, but does that really mean Prime Video's billion-plus-dollar budget is necessary?

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy had a combined budget of about $281 million, and obviously got a lot done with it. The scale of Rings of Power may be bigger, and modern costs may bump that price up regardless, but it's difficult to say that quadrupling Lord of the Rings' budget would ever have been necessary. A spectacular TV show certainly could have been made for less money. Instead, Prime Video was eager to create a spectacle unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Had Rings of Power been faithful to the books as well as visually spectacular, complaints might have been minimal. Instead, that high budget only adds insult to injury regarding all the ways this show went wrong. Had Prime Video paid better attention to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, it might have learned that greedy and wasteful profligacy never ends well. Had Rings of Power taken a more humble approach, as Tolkien's works emphasized, it would have more easily earned victory.