The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

The series is licensed from The Lord of the Rings and its appendices only, not from The Silmarillion, which is the constraint that shapes it: the Second Age events it dramatises exist in the appendices as a chronology of names and dates, so most of the connective material is written for the series.

The series is set in Tolkien's Second Age and is made in the shadow of Jackson's films. Its landscape photography, the aerial passes standing in for a journey, the armour and architecture language, and the forced-perspective approach to filming small characters beside tall ones are all recognisably the trilogy's grammar. The qualification matters and is why this is weighted low. The rights are separate: Amazon licensed the appendices from the Tolkien Estate, not New Line's films, so the production could not simply reuse the films' designs and has said it worked from the books. Howard Shore wrote a new main title theme for the series rather than the trilogy's themes being carried over. The inheritance is one of visual expectation rather than of licensed material.