Tim Forte, an Amazon analyst, says he was worried about the performance of the company’s billion-dollar Rings of Power boondoggle.
So he decided to give the show a look.
After giving the show a look, he’s even more concerned.
Why?
Like most of us, he fell asleep.
“We fell asleep during our first viewings of episodes one, three, and four and have not watched episode five yet due to a combination of not enjoying the first four episodes and a busy schedule,” Forte told investors.
Forte is an analyst at D.A. Davidson and said he was hopeful the show would improve after its much-maligned two-episode launch. He told investors that he had expected Rings of Power to open with a low Rotten Tomatoes audience score due to Tolkien purists expressing their displeasure. But…
“Nearly one month after its September 1 launch and five episodes in on an eight-episode season, the audience response (as measured by Rotten Tomatoes) is far worse than we initially expected (as suggested by the critics’ warm reception) and is not improving (as we had, initially, anticipated),” Forte told investors.
Currently, the audience score at Rotten Tomatoes sits at a dreadful 38 percent. Amazon claims the show was review-bombed, even though the gay romcom Bros has a 91 percent audience score. If anything was going to get review bombed, it was that.
My Rings of Power review was already so negative I felt it would be overkill to include the fact I fell asleep during the second episode, but the truth is that I did. This was the middle of the afternoon. I had to rewind it and try again.
Gee, you’d think rousing scenes like this one would turn things around for the floundering series:
The great Ace of Spades described the clip above this way:
In case you missed it: the woke Rings of Power, aka We Had Rangz, featured a MAGA Rally, in which a racist Trumpian rabble rouser stirred the racist passions of Men against the Elf Immigrant Laborers (do elves really migrate from place to place to do day-labor?), shouting that “elves come on ships” “to take your trades” (they took our jerbs!) and that their queen is an “elf-lover.”
Make Angmar Great Again!!!
Amazon continues to claim Rings of Power is its biggest hit, but that’s not the point. Amazon spent a billion — with a “B” — dollars on this sucker and committed to five seasons. When you drop that kind of cash, even if you’re an Amazon, you need more than a hit. You need a game changer; you need a Breaking Bad or Sopranos, a show that changes how people perceive your outlet or the genre.
On top of that, Amazon’s repeated claim of 25 million Rings viewers is disputed, well, by Amazon’s own claim:
Amazon.com Inc. said more than 25 million people around the world sampled the premiere of its highly anticipated series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Sept 2., the biggest debut in the streaming service’s history.
Please note the word “sampled.”
Amazon is not claiming that 25 million people watched its terrible show. If you read that closely, you’ll see that Amazon is claiming 25 million sampled its crummy show.
According to Samba TV, only 1.8 million watched the Rings premiere over the first four days. Compare that to HBO’s new House of the Dragon premiere, which enjoyed 4.8 million viewers over its first four days.
Amazon has a dog on its hands, a billion-dollar snoozer, a real bore. As I said in my review, I could not care less about the racial make-up of the characters. That’s not the show’s problem. The problem is that the story stinks, the characters are unappealing, and rather than attempting to create something timeless, Amazon went for timely, with a shelf life of about ten minutes.
Fantasy is about escape. Amazon chose to take one of our most timeless fantasy stories and turn it into a timely polemic about today’s stupid and tiresome gender and racial debates. This results in smug, annoying characters, eye-rolling scenes like the MAGA moment above, and a 38 percent audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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