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record with 10 million viewers in its premiere last month and boosted its viewership by 2% for its second episode. “The Rings of Power” is led by showrunners and executive producers Payne and Patrick McKay.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the biggest thing Amazon Prime Video has ever done, and it looks like the TV series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing has delivered big time.

Amazon Prime Video quietly introduced a new 72-hour delay for all user reviews posted to Prime Video, a representative for the streamer confirmed to Variety. Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin. The practice caught notice after the premiere of the first two episodes of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” Prime Video’s monumentally scaled fantasy series based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The series appears to have been review bombed — when trolls flood intentionally negative reviews for a show or film — on other sites like Rotten Tomatoes, where it has an 84% rating from professional critics but a 37% from user-submitted reviews. “The Rings of Power” has been fending off trolls for months, especially ones who take issue with the decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves, harfoots and other folk of Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth.

“Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” which is a prequel based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien that’s set thousands of years before the events of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings.” Several new 2022 films will be available on the streamer as well: including Channing Tatum’s “Dog,” Michael Bay’s “Ambulance,” Zac Efron’s “Firestarter,” Dylan O’Brien’s “The Outfit,” and more. Noteworthy library titles arriving this month include “Fight Club” (1999), “Legally Blonde” (2001) and “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).

Today (September 1) sees the launch in the US of Amazon Prime Video ’s highly anticipated series, The Rings of Power. This epic drama, set thousands of years before the events of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is thought to be the most expensive TV series ever made.

Once upon a time, there was a stigma between film and television, and when you were a big movie star, you never dared appear in a lowly TV series, and if you were a TV star, crossing over into movie stardom was unheard of and barely ever happened unless your name was John Travolta or George Clooney. And yes, thanks to prestige TV and the Age of Streaming, those days are long gone.

EXCLUSIVE: Emma Roberts (Madame Web) will exec produce and star in Space Cadet, a new rom-com from Stampede Ventures, which enters production this month. Also now aboard the film from writer-director Liz W. Garcia (The Lifeguard) is Prime Video, which will distribute it internationally.

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While audiences anxious await Anne Hathaway‘s next performance in James Gray‘s “Armageddon Time,” in theaters this October, there’s news about one of her upcoming roles. Deadline reports that Hathaway will team up with “The Eyes Of Tammy Faye” director Michael Showalter for a new project for Amazon Prime Video.

K.J. Yossman “Clarkson’s Farm,” the break-out British Amazon Prime Video hit starring former “Top Gear” host Jeremy Clarkson attempting to run a farm in the Cotswolds, has just wrapped and is already in the edit suite, confirmed Amazon Studios’ U.K. head of originals Dan Grabiner. “Because it’s farming and it’s authentic it’s so linked to the seasons and the farming year and the weather and things like that,” Grabiner said at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Wednesday morning. “Season 2 has just about wrapped filming. It looks amazing, I think that’s fair to say.” Grabiner also promised fans more of the show’s break-out stars Kaleb Cooper, a farming contractor, and experienced farmer Gerald Cooper, who tries to guide Clarkson in his thick West Country accent.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Soumya Sriraman, the former BritBox CEO who joined Amazon to lead its Prime Video Channels business in the U.S., is stepping down after two years at the SVOD. Sources indicate the executive is still at Amazon but will be leaving imminently for another role elsewhere. Sriraman is best known for her work pioneering the best-of-British streaming service BritBox in the U.S., where she is based. The SVOD launched there in 2017 and quickly reached 250,000 subscribers in one year. By the time Sriraman departed, in October 2020, the service had more than 1.5 million subscribers. The successful U.S. launch allowed joint operators BBC Studios and ITV to expand the brand to other markets, including Australia and Canada.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Amazon Studios is merging its Prime Video and Freevee unscripted teams  under the oversight of reality TV vet Chris Castallo. Having previously focused on Prime Video fare, Castallo will now oversee unscripted for both outlets and report to Lauren Anderson, who was recently named head of AVOD original content and programming at Amazon Studios. The move comes following a restructure inside Amazon’s ad-supported video on demand service. Earlier this month, Ryan Pirozzi was named head of Freevee, overseeing the business side of the streaming service, while Anderson was given oversight for programming, which includes development, production, licensing, scheduling, research and strategy for Freevee and Prime Video’s ad-supported FAST linear channels. Anderson and Pirozzi had formerly served as co-heads of content and programming for Amazon Freevee (the ad-supported video on demand service that had been known as IMDb TV).

announced that ABC had ordered the show’s pilot, marking Ventimiglia’s first role following the conclusion of NBC’s “This Is Us.” The pilot episode is written by Cohen and directed and executive produced by Ben Younger.Ventimiglia is represented by Management 360, Verve and McKuin Frankel Whitehead and Cohen.  DiVide is repped by Verve and McKuin Frankel Whitehead and Cohen.

Ariana DeBose has landed a new leading role!

The Western genre waned in popularity in the 1980s, but 21st-century cinema still has the occasional film that harks to its heyday. Most of these are genre hybrids, like Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” or S.

More than 350,000 households ditched subscriptions to the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ last quarter, according to regulator Ofcom’s annual Media Nations UK report, which showed a record year for British high-end TV production.

EXCLUSIVE: Ted Lasso executive producer and comedian Jamie Lee has signed with Brillstein Entertainment Partners for representation.

Nielsen and Amazon have signed a three-year agreement to measure Prime Video’s exclusive NFL “Thursday Night Football” beginning this fall.The deal marks the first time a streaming service will have one of its live programs measured as part of Nielsen’s National TV measurement service.“Thursday Night Football” will be “processed” like other NFL agains, per Nielsen, using the company’s panel, allowing for the same metrics to be reported across all other national networks, continued trending, and comparability, Nielsen said in a release.“Nielsen is the long-time leader in the measurement space, providing gold-standard currency to the media industry and we’re thrilled that Amazon recognizes that and is working with us to bring a streaming service into our National TV measurement for the first time ever,” Deirdre Thomas, managing director, U.S. Audience Measurement Product Sales, Nielsen, said in a statement.

K.J. Yossman Amazon Prime Video have given fans a first look at their upcoming U.K.

Zack Sharf Lisa Kudrow made headlines in May 2020 when she acknowledged that “Friends” had a serious lack of diversity during its 10 season run on NBC. The actor said that if the show ever returned to TV then “it would not be an all-white cast.” In a new interview with The Daily Beast, however, Kudrow somewhat stood by the original sitcom’s lack of diversity, or least made sense of it.