'Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' Reviews & Ratings Suspended By Prime Video

Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Netflix, Peacock, Discovery+ and even more streaming services, there’s no shortage of options when choosing what to binge-watch this weekend. However, sometimes the amount of great film and television available to stream can be overwhelming and lead to scrolling aimlessly — hoping to land on that perfect piece of content.  Scroll no more! To help you out, ET has rounded up the best movies and TV shows to stream this weekend, including new arrivals, nostalgia-filled favorites and titles you may have missed the (well-deserved) hype on that are worth circling back for.From a new season of  to new episodes of The Handmaid's Tale and HBO's, we’ve got your content covered this week. For even more recommendations, make sure to check out our guide for everything new on Prime Video, Hulu, Peacock, Apple TV+ and more this month.

Amazon’s Hail Mary play to bring the NFL to streaming looks like a touchdown in Week 1.

“While we’re still waiting for official Nielsen ratings, our measurement shows that the audience numbers exceeded all of our expectations for viewership,” Prime Video’s top sports exec Jay Marine said today in a note to staff on the “resounding success” of the streamer’s official Thursday Night Football kickoff on September 15.

Nicholas Galitzine (Purple Hearts) has been tapped to star alongside Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway in Prime Video’s film The Idea of You, based on Robinne Lee’s bestselling contemporary love story of the same name, which goes into production in October.

Angelique Jackson In Amazon Prime Video’s “The Idea of You,” Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway stars as a divorced mother who sparks a passionate love affair with a pop star she meets after taking her daughter to a music festival. And now, the object of her on-screen desire has been cast. Nicholas Galitzine will play Hayes Campbell — the 24-year-old lead singer of the “hottest boy band on the planet,” August Moon — who has been speculated by fans of Robinne Lee’s bestselling debut novel to be inspired by Harry Styles. The film follows Hathaway’s Sophie, who saves the day after her ex-husband Dan (who left her for a younger woman) cancels his Coachella trip with their 15-year-old daughter. When she decides to brave the crowds and desert heat to take her daughter to the music festival, Sophie meets Hayes (Galitzine), and the 40-year-old’s life really heats up.

EXCLUSIVE: Coming off a main role in Outer Range, Shaun Sipos has joined another Prime Video series. He has been tapped as a major lead opposite Alan Ritchson in the upcoming second season of Reacher.

Jáde Osiberu, the co-writer and director of Gangs of Lagos, has signed an overall deal with Prime Video, the studio behind the upcoming feature drama.

posted a photo of themselves wearing a fan-made shirt with human, hobbit and elf ears with different skin tones.Also included on the shirt is the mantra “You are all welcome here,” written in Elvish.Astin, who was not in the photo, shared a Twitter pic of himself wearing a hat with the same legend.“You Are All Welcome Here,” Wood, 41, captioned his photo.The “Lord of the Rings” show also released a statement regarding the racist attacks.You Are All Welcome Here @LOTRonPrime @DonMarshall72 #RingsOfPower https://t.co/8txOhlHa2f pic.twitter.com/nWytILT0zG“We, the cast of Rings of Power, stand together in absolute solidarity and against the relentless racism, threats, harassment and abuse some of our cast mates of color are being subjected to on a daily basis,” the statement reads.“We refuse to ignore it or tolerate it.”The statement goes on to say that “Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien created a world where people from different races and cultures existed, along with the hashtag #youarewelcomehere.“From Middle-earth to a galaxy far, far away… #YouAreAllWelcomeHere,” the official “Star Wars” account responded on Twitter.“Rings of Power” isn’t the only show to receive racist backlash over cast diversity.In June, “Obi-Wan Kenobi” actress Moses Ingram was also subject to racist trolls over her role as Reva.

Since the mid-1980s, William Gibson has set a precedent for heady SF novels, with “Neuromancer” and its “Sprawl” trilogy being the ur-texts of cyberpunk. So, how have William Gibson‘s novels never crossed over to movies and TV? Maybe because Gibson’s speculative fiction is too hard to translate to a broad appeal.

Qurate Retail Group, the John Malone-backed owner of video screen shopping mainstays QVC and HSN, has installed former Amazon exec Soumya Sriraman as president of streaming.

David Simonsen is joining Amazon and taking over the new position of Director Prime Video, Southeast Asia. He will be based in Singapore and is starting on Monday, September 5.

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.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” had a laugh on Twitter when a goofy promotional video for the new series was confused for the series’ opening sequence.“Apparently this is the intro for the new LOTR show… this is what $750 million buys you,” a Twitter user wrote alongside the clip on Wednesday, mocking the series’ enormous price tag.That video — which now has 4.1 million views, more than 20,700 likes and 10,000 quote tweets — features the “Rings” cast gazing into the camera as well as making bizarre, comical movements. “Half of the actors look like someone snuck up on them in between takes while they were having a conversation or eating a sandwich,” one Twitter user said. However, in a sea of jokes about the video, many users pointed out that Entertainment Weekly’s watermark is in the corner of the video, meaning it’s obviously not the series’ opening credits.

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.

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.

“The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.” Based on the appendices of the original trilogy, the series expands upon the original text to answer some of the crucial queries proposed by Tolkein. Questions like: what cost does war have on the young lives supplied to fight it? At what point is the individual greater than the community? How does one preserve their legacy? These eternal haunting questions search for answers amongst the resplendent beauty of New Zealand’s vast terrain, charming new characters and frightening paths to a country divided and at war. The series begins with a black screen and the words, “Nothing is evil in the beginning. And there was a time when the world was so young there had not yet been a sunrise.