It was clear that the first question of many when ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ was announced was to know if Peter Jackson was going to be involved. The truth is that at first that was the idea, but the filmmaker himself has just revealed that he later never had any news of Amazon Prime Video.
In statements to The Hollywood Reporter, the director of ‘Heavenly Creatures’ claims that the studio initially contacted him to see if he wanted to be part of the project. Jackson made it clear that he first of all wanted to see the scripts, but waited and waited to never receive anything:
About four or five years ago they asked me if I was interested, so I said, ‘Do you have the scripts yet?’ Because I know how hard it was to write the movie scripts and I didn’t know the people who wrote them. They said, ‘Oh no, we don’t have the scripts yet, but as soon as we do, we’ll send them to you.’ So I was waiting for the scripts to come and they never came.
Amazon’s response
Jackson doesn’t hold a grudge once morest Amazon and is looking forward to seeing the series, to the point of commenting that “all I’m looking forward to is seeing her as a perfectly neutral viewer“However, what is the reason for this vacuum that Amazon made to Jackson? The company itself has released a statement explaining it:
In our pursuit of the rights to our series, we were forced to keep the series distinct and separate from the movies. We have the utmost respect for Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings movies and are delighted that you are looking forward to seeing The Rings of Power.
From ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ they point out a quite plausible explanation: the Tolkien State he might have vetoed any possible involvement of Jackson in the project. Let’s remember that Tolkien’s son deeply hated the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy and that, unlike in the movies, the Tolkien State is involved in the series. Obviously there will be more factors, but I doubt any one is more important.
