Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power SPOILER discussion

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Out September 2nd on Amazon.

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Yeah, that’s one character where they should be able to do it in a way that’s hardly noticeable.

I agree it’s a shame though, that was a really good actor.

Wonderfully held back performance there. And “We prefer Uruk” is still my favourite line from that show.

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Todd

Rings of Power Shocker: Barely 1/3 of Viewers Finished Streaming Season 1

The first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power indeed took viewers on an epic journey, just not a well-attended one.

Only 37 percent of domestic Prime Video subscribers who started the fantasy drama’s first season completed all eight episodes, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The show reportedly performed slightly better overseas, where its completion rate is 45 percent.

According to THR‘s source, even a 50 percent completion rate wouldn’t be considered exceptional, especially for such an expensive series. (The first season cost Amazon roughly $715 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.)

Despite those reported figures, Prime Video boss Jennifer Salke stands by the Middle-earth series, which is expected to return for its second season sometime in 2024.

“This desire to paint the show as anything less than a success — it’s not reflective of any conversation I’m having internally,” Salke tells THR. “The second season, currently in production, will have more dramatic story turns. That’s a huge opportunity for us. The first season required a lot of setting up.”

TVLine readers gave the series’ double-episode launch an average grade of “B,” the finale netted a “B+,” and the season as whole earned a “B.” The series was also well-received by critics, with TVLine’s own Dave Nemetz handing the “gorgeously immersive epic” a grade of “A-.”

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Chris-S

Jesus. And they’re obviously committed to more season of this, with the money they’ve poured into it.

And Season 2 won’t stream till 2024. That won’t help.

Amazon bought the television rights for The Lord of the Rings from the Tolkien Estate in November 2017, making a five-season production commitment worth at least US$1 billion. Those viewership numbers had tohave sent a panic through the halls of Amazon. I wonder if they will push through and do all five seasons or will they cut their losses and end it after Season 2, if the numbers don’t improve.

Is it possible that at least some of that incredibly high production cost of the first season was in manufacturing and building stuff that’s going to be used in more than one season? Because that’d certainly make it harder to cut their losses at some point.

Todd wrote:

According to THR‘s source, even a 50 percent completion rate wouldn’t be considered exceptional, especially for such an expensive series

ehhhh press X to doubt… shows get dropped by viewers a lot more that we tend to imagine… I don’t remember the numbers now, but I’ve seen articles of viewership drops and IIRC, a 37-45% completion rate is actually not that bad… I might be misremembering though, I’ll try to find those numbers again later.

This is interesting, so I tried to look it up. Apparently, Netflix cancels series if the completion rate is under 50%, at least according to this:

As Forbes pointed out in a recent article, the easiest way to predict whether a Netflix show will be renewed or canceled is to look at its completion rate (aka, what percentage of people who watched a show actually finished it). If the completion rate is over 50 percent, the show gets renewed. If it’s under 50 percent… well, you can guess what happens then.

https://www.inverse.com/culture/1899-canceled-netflix-completion-rates

Some examples from that Forbes article:

Some numbers from earlier this year:

Heartstopper had a 73% completion rate and was renewed
The Lincoln Lawyer had a 56% completion rate and was renewed
Resident Evil spent a good amount of time at #1, but only had a 45% completion rate and was cancelled.
First Kill had a 44% completion rate and was cancelled.
Squid Game had a sky-high completion rate of 87% and was obviously renewed.
Arcane had a 60% completion rate and was renewed
The Irregulars had a 41% completion rate and was cancelled
Love Death and Robots had a 67% completion rate and was renewed
Pieces of Her and Inventing Anna had 54% and 42% completion rates respectively, but both were limited series, so renewal didn’t matter.

Gaiman also said that the completion rate is important to Netflix (on twitter, while waiting for news on Sandman’s renewal), at least with an expensive show like Sandman. I don’t think completion rate is all it is – obviously, it depends on the cost of the series and on how large the viewership of the first episodes is in the first place. But it seems that over 50% is the kind of completion rate they expect for a medium expensive production in order for it to be renewed.

It does make sense. Those people who didn’t finish season 1 aren’t likely to come back for season 2, and it’s also unlikely that new viewers will come on board if the audience has been shrinking in the first place.

All of which does make Rings of Power a disaster for amazon video. But given the extent of their commitment, they’ll have to up the ante, I guess – go even bigger, especially when it comes to promoting the second season.

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Chris-S, Todd, Ben

I’m starting to wonder if, culturally, people are moving away from completing things.  The completion percentages on PS trophies hit some surprising figures.  Even on the big, very popular games.

Jon wrote:

Todd wrote:

According to THR‘s source, even a 50 percent completion rate wouldn’t be considered exceptional, especially for such an expensive series

ehhhh press X to doubt… shows get dropped by viewers a lot more that we tend to imagine… I don’t remember the numbers now, but I’ve seen articles of viewership drops and IIRC, a 37-45% completion rate is actually not that bad… I might be misremembering though, I’ll try to find those numbers again later.

Most streaming series have 10 episodes and most network series have 13 – 22 episodes in a season.

TRoP had EIGHT episodes and the first two episodes dropped at the same time. Add to the fact that the costs associated with this series are way higher than most other streaming shows. The complete series has been available for months to binge in case someone wanted to go back and finish it.

Sorry, but this is a fucking disaster for Amazon. There’s no other way to look at it.

I do wonder if they had followed the dump model and dropped all the episodes at once if it would have faired better. Would more people have pushed through all eight episodes over a weekend to complete the series instead of being given the opportunity to drop it on after watching the current week’s drop.

I think it might have helped this show.

The weekly model is good for generating buzz assuming the episode is good enough to generate it and can stand up to analysis the schedule encouraged.  This one couldn’t do either of those so dropping the entire series might have been the better way to go.

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Todd

Eh maybe, but I’m gonna be honest, in terms of popularity I tend to look more to what gets more pirated, since that tends to be a much more reliable metric of popularity… unsurprisingly, the most pirated shows are in fact also the most viewed ones, and I can tell you ROP had pretty good piracy numbers.

It’d be more interesting if we knew how many people tried it for at least one episode, even if for a few minutes, because that would give a lot more context to what that 37% really means. Amazon isn’t netflix and I doubt they have the same type of numbers… lots of people have amazon prime because of the actual advantages to buying on amazon and not for the shows… it could be a case of A LOT of people who don’t fall into the usual Netflix-type of customers just clicking to check it out and then not being interested.

My point is… sure, 37% might sound bad… but 37% out of how many? 37% out of 200K people is still a lot more than 73% out of 20K people… the completion percentage can’t be the only metric that matters here, either for netflix or amazon for that matter.

Of those who pirated it, did every one of them watch the entire series? Was it higher or lower than the legit method? How many downloaded the first couple of episodes, watched them, and then didn’t download the rest? We will never know. Pirating is not a reliable metric in this case.

37% of X vs 37% of Y is a meaningless comparison. It’s still 37%. That is a terrible completion rate for such an expensive project like this.

Game of Thrones became one of those rare shows that really resonated with people around the world. I don’t think TRoP did when it was airing. (I’m not sure House of the Dragon did either.) on the other hand, The Last of Us just dominated conversations when episodes were coming out.

Ultimately, people tried TRoP and just didn’t connect with it.

Yeah, I was one of the people who never completed it. I think I got partway through episode 2 and that was plenty. The kids were bored out their minds too and they loved even the poorer hobbit movies and were extremely excited to watch it.

I don’t know anyone offline who finished it.

For the most expensive show of all time there’s no getting away from it being a complete and utter disaster, whether you enjoyed it or not.

Todd wrote:

37% of X vs 37% of Y is a meaningless comparison. It’s still 37%. That is a terrible completion rate for such an expensive project like this.

No, what’s meaningless is a random percentage of nothing at all… and falling for some blatant bullshit article that’s not saying anything at all, because AGAIN, saying “only 37% of people finished it” doesn’t mean absolutely anything at all unless we know how many people started it… i.e. 37% of how many.

Not saying the show didn’t have issues, just saying that articles is clickbait bullshit, as usual… but hey, if you guys wanna go with it, sure go with it

This is better info and a better comparison:

https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-the-boys-beats-rings-of-power-to-become-amazons-most-watched-2022-show-556827

As per Nielsen ratings, The Boys, which got its third season in 2022, was the most watched Amazon original show with 10.6 billion minutes viewed. In comparison Rings of Power was watched for 9.4 billion minutes.

Now, it would be interesting to know which percentage of TB viewers dropped it for comparison sake, but since that is a comparison in minutes I suppose it doesn’t matter… the take-away being, ROP was disappointing for sure, but 1+ billion less minutes than one of the most succesful (if not the most) Amazon original shows ain’t too shabby… of course, when compared to GOT or HOTD, yeah it’s probably not great.

Either way, that other article is BS… which was my point.

 

Rings of Power cost about 5 times as much as The Boys to make, so you’d expect it to outperform it by quite some margin in order to justify that investment.

Jon wrote:

Now, it would be interesting to know which percentage of TB viewers dropped it for comparison sake, but since that is a comparison in minutes I suppose it doesn’t matter… the take-away being, ROP was disappointing for sure, but 1+ billion less minutes than one of the most succesful (if not the most) Amazon original shows ain’t too shabby… of course, when compared to GOT or HOTD, yeah it’s probably not great.

Well, it does make a huge difference if more than half of this sum of minutes goes into the first few episodes, and the last are only watched a third of that time. Because what counts isn’t the overall minutes of a show being watched, but rather the question whether a show will bring in/keep subscribers, and that won’t happen with the second season of a show with a shrinking audience. If the dynamic is, a huge amount of people were excited to check this out (on the strength of previous movie LotR material and the ads), but two thirds of those people walked away, that means chances are only the remaining one third will tune in next time, which means that next time, you will only have about 4 billion of those minutes, and that’d count as a complete dud compared to The Boys.

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Chris-S, Todd

Yeah it’s not about absolute minutes watched, it’s about gauging whether a show is sufficiently attractive to audiences to make it worth the investment.

I thought Rings Of Power was OK for a while but by the end I felt like the show had gone off the rails. And I’m one of the relative few who completed it!

Ultimately I can’t believe they blew so much cash on a project like this with untested showrunners and nobody making sure the story fundamentals were solid. It can look as lavish and expensive as it likes, but if the story is poor then people are going to switch off.

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Chris-S, Todd, Ben

Dave wrote:

Ultimately I can’t believe they blew so much cash on a project like this with untested showrunners and nobody making sure the story fundamentals were solid.

This is the larger problem… shit, not even the part about the untested showrunners, but just blowing soooooooooo much money on a show is kinda ridiculous. But then again, Amazon’s got money to literally burn away, so it’s not like they’re in trouble financially or anything…

Christian wrote:

that means chances are only the remaining one third will tune in next time, which means that next time, you will only have about 4 billion of those minutes, and that’d count as a complete dud compared to The Boys.

Well IF that happens, sure, it’ll be really bad… but that’s still just speculation… it could always go the other way and grow its audience, like GOT did, if they make a solid second season.

In the end, if they’re going ahead with a 2nd season it’s probably because they’re fine enough with the result of the 1st one.

 

Jon wrote:

In the end, if they’re going ahead with a 2nd season it’s probably because they’re fine enough with the result of the 1st one.

Pretty sure they had already committed to making a second season before the first aired. I think the real test will be where it goes from here.

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Todd, Ben

If they only made one season of this then Bezos would look like a failure, there’s no way he’s not putting up the cash to save his blushes

I have no doubt he will try and address what he perceives the reason to be for it’s failure, but whether or not he is actually able to rescue the situation will be based on the people that are brought in to run, write and direct.
I’ve not followed any of it closely but I assume those two guys he hired to oversee the show have been given the bullet?

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Todd, Ben

Jon wrote:

Well IF that happens, sure, it’ll be really bad… but that’s still just speculation… it could always go the other way and grow its audience, like GOT did, if they make a solid second season.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? GoT grew its audience from season 1 to season 2 because pretty much everybody who watched the first three episodes or so kept watching until the finale*, which blew them away, and they kept telling everybody around them how awesome this show was, so more people tuned in for season 2 and those people had to catch up on season 1 and after season 2, even more people… and so on and on. But if you’re losing your audience during the first season, if two thirds trickle away from the show, that means you’re not building an audience.

*This is making an assumption, obviously, but I think it’s the most likely scenario. It’d be nice to have some actual data, of course, but I don’t think that’s available.

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Todd, Ben, Chris-S