The cast and crew have been urged to “not report to the set or to the studio without the express permission of your supervisor.” Indeed, the halting of production will not only keep them safe and stem the possibility of spreading the virus in its 10-day symptom dormancy, but also ease the impact that the production would have on “the resources and infrastructures around us by doing our part to reduce population density in our communities and daily activities, in efforts to help reduce the spread of the virus.”
Amazon’s still mysterious Lord of the Rings series is one of the most anticipated and grandiose television projects, perhaps ever, and was preemptively renewed for a second season last November, with designs to shoot the sophomore frame concurrently with its initial offering. The series will set itself in the monumental Middle Earth mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien, as famously represented by 1937 novel The Hobbit and the 1954-1955 The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, with the latter eventually adapted to Oscar-winning glory by director Peter Jackson, who also tackled the former as a film trilogy, cementing the global financial lucrativeness of Tolkien’s fantasy franchise. The TV series will take place during Middle Earth’s Second Age, set thousands of years before the events of the main novels.
The series, manifesting under the creative purview of showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, has a cast consisting of Markella Kavenagh, Robert Aramayo, Ema Horvath, Maxim Baldry, Joseph Mawle and Morfydd Clark, who’s confirmed to play a younger (thousands of years younger,) version of Galadriel, the elven Lady of Lothlorien, who was famously played by Cate Blanchett in 2001-2003’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and reprised a decade later in 2012-2014’s The Hobbit films. It seems that the cameras have been rolling for some time, with the memo confirming the show’s status before the production halt, stating, “We were well into shooting. Everybody was in place so there weren’t many people coming from overseas recently.”
Amazon has yet to reveal a release window for its Lord of the Rings series other than the vague declaration of eyeing a 2021 arrival, so the effect of the production halt on any prospective timeframe is unknown. Hopefully for the sake of the world and—to a significantly lesser extent—the sake of the series, the coronavirus pandemic won’t ultimately become potent enough to sideline things for too long.
