The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 is picking up steam, according to Amazon.
In the 11 days since it premiered, the second installment has amassed 40M viewers with four episodes currently available, Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon MGM Studios, revealed in an internal memo to staff on Tuesday.
It has been No. 1 on Prime Video globally, and it is now one of the streamer’s Top 5 TV seasons of all-time in terms of total viewership through 11 days, Salke says.
According to the memo, “tens of millions” have also tuned in to Season 1 since early August, likely in preparation for Season 2’s August 29 debut.
“We’ve seen an impressive amount of our Rings of Power customers coming from outside of the U.S., which is a testament to the show’s resonance with global audiences and the remarkable growth of Prime Video customers worldwide,” the memo read.
It’s likely that Salke is actually referring to the number of accounts that watched, as opposed to actual number of viewers, since it would be impossible for Amazon to measure how many people were viewing at the time an account was streaming the content — a capability that Nielsen has due to its own data on how many people live in the households the company measures. Amazon tends to report “viewers” for successful titles, but has declined to offer clarification on this point.
As Deadline previously reported, Rings of Power has struggled to match the audience it wrangled in its first season, down around 50% in its debut weekend, according to data from Samba TV.
When Season 1 debuted, Amazon touted that the series had tallied more than 25M viewers in its first day, indicating that it likely hit the 40M mark much faster than Season 2.
It is common for a series to lose some of its audience between seasons, especially given there were two years in between. Rings of Power has been faced with a steeper-than-usual decline, though it is entirely possible that it will reclaim some of that audience by the end of the season. That’s what happened with HBO’s House of the Dragon, which saw a 22% decline for its Season 2 premiere, but was able to grow over the course of the season to finish strong.
Season 1 of Rings of Power also reigned over the Nielsen streaming charts when it debuted, racking up 1.25B minutes viewed in its first week. Nielsen’s reporting is about a month delayed, so data for Season 2 won’t be available until later in September, though it will very likely make the charts despite the drop in viewership.
Rings of Power takes place thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and The Lord of the Rings books with an ensemble cast of familiar faces mixed with new characters. Set in the not-for-long peaceful Second Age of Middle Earth, the show marks a first-time venture into the adaptation of Tolkein’s history of the fabled period. Villain Sauron (Charlie Vickers) will be on the rise in Season 2.
