What if Lord of the Rings was made into TV show? Would it have been better than Game of Thrones?

With Game of Thrones coming to an end soon, there’s going to be a hole in our lives for a big-budget fantasy show. Amazon apparently hopes to fill that hole with one of the biggest fantasy worlds around, and is planning an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved series.

Reports that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has gotten personally involved in a series of negotiations between Amazon Studios, Warner Bros. TV, and the Tolkien estate to bring the seminal trilogy of books to the small screen. Talks are apparently in the earliest of stages and no deal has been set yet, but the report further claims that Warner Bros. and Tolkien’s estate have been shopping a live-action TV adaptation around before these talks, and Amazon has emerged as a frontrunner. News of Warner Bros. and the Tolkien Estate working together again is also a surprise, given that their long, bitter battle stemming out of the Warner Bros.-produced Peter Jackson movie characters being used in video games and slot machines only recently concluded.

The deal would be a huge get for Amazon Studios, which has already made a name for itself with its adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Man in the High Castle, and has been wanting to make a move into larger-scale, wide-appeal original content recently. Lord of the Rings would be a significant step in that direction, and arguably the company’s biggest and grandest foray into TV yet, if the deal goes through. And that’s a big if, given how early this allegedly all is.

Lord of the Rings was a lot more predictable: nobody really thought Gandalf was dead and we knew who was going to prevail at the end. It was a great ride and a huge amount of fun but we knew good was going to triumph. Nobody has any idea who is going to be the winner at the end of the Game of Thrones, or if there will be any victor at all. You can make that level of uncertainty last for 7 years but audiences won’t watch 70 hours of TV if an ending is so predictable.

There are several books based off the lore of Middle earth. There is so much that can be mined out of those books for deep character development.

What could make it especially sensational is side stories about characters like Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins… how they became who they were leading up to where you see them as center stage characters in the trilogy.

The hobbit alone (a prequel) is 95,000 words. In fact the entire lore of middle earth including the three novels that make up LOTR is a total of 1,187,677 words.

The Silmarillion is a 130,115 word count that is the lore of the world of middle earth. There is so much information here that creating an intensely gripping story would make sense.

The problem however is like game of thrones, it would not be an inexpensive venture.

Though LOTR movies are pretty long, over 4 hours, jackson wasn’t able to adapt the books into movies 100% right, since he missed most details in the book.

So if LOTR was made into a TV show, jackson could work on some more details from the epic world tolkien had created.

Plus if LOTR were to become a TV show, both the silmarillion and the hobbit would be adapted as well. In my personal opinion, LOTR would attract a lot more people than GOT.

And more importantly, will we see some of the original cast returning to their former roles? Or a complete new cast for a new generation?