DISASTER Strikes! The Rings of Power Season 2 Viewership CRASHES—What Went Wrong?

The Rings Of Power

Credit: Amazon

Luminate Data has released its streaming report for 2024 which includes a whole bunch of interesting data, including the top 10 streaming shows of the year. Unsurprisingly, Netflix was the top dog in 2024 with 7 out of 10 shows making the list. Taylor Sheridan snagged the number two spot with two of his shows on the list. The only series that wasn’t either a Sheridan production or on Netflix was Fallout on Prime Video.

Here’s the full list, in billions of minutes watched:

Notably absent from this list were two very big, expensive TV shows that aired in 2024: The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power on Prime Video and Star Wars: The Acolyte on Disney+. Indeed, not a single Disney show made the list. The top Disney+ offering was Percy Jackson and the Olympians which clocked in at about 3 billion minutes viewed, with The Acolyte trailing at #2 with just under 2.7 billion minutes viewed.

While franchises continue to be key drivers of engagement on streaming, 2024 saw diminishing returns for some of the biggest properties on television. Both 2024 live-action Marvel TV series, Echo and Agatha All Along, underperformed 2023 Marvel series Loki Season 2 and Secret Invasion. And the second season of Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power saw a 60% decrease in total minutes watched from the show’s first season.

A 60% drop is massive. This is in stark contrast to Game Of Thrones, which saw sizable increases in viewership every season.

This is the natural conclusion of several big mistakes made by Amazon:

Showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne were inexperienced. They had never been showrunners before, and had no previous experience producing any shows, let alone a massive epic fantasy with a budget in the hundreds of millions. This alone is not enough to explain the show’s myriad mistakes, however, as Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had also never produced a show of this scale.
The changes from the source material were bizarre. Compressing the timeline of the Second Age of Middle-earth makes sense on paper, but ultimately made the show confusing and jumbled. Getting some events—like the forging of the Rings of Power—out of chronological order certainly didn’t help.
The general lack of writing quality across the board was apparent even to casual viewers. The scripts were filled with plot-holes, generic fantasy tropes and bad dialogue.
There’s a sense throughout the show that it was trying to appeal to the most casual audiences—the vague “modern audience” we hear so much about—with little regard for Tolkien’s most passionate fans. Creating an adaptation of Tolkien’s work without appealing to the built-in fanbase is a truly baffling decision, but we’ve seen the same strange trend across numerous IPs, from Star Wars to Marvel and beyond. The new audience doesn’t show up and the old audience checks out. Nobody wins.

It is unclear how Amazon can pick up the pieces at this point. Two seasons have already been released. The story and all its many flaws is too far gone to recover. Short of a complete reboot, starting from scratch with better writers and new showrunners, I fear that Season 3 will only continue the downward trend.

Watch my video discussion of the report below:

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