User reviews for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are reportedly being delayed by Amazon. In an effort to combat Internet trolls, the studio is reportedly adding a 72-hour delay to all user reviews for the program. Each review will go through a process of evaluation during that brief window to determine whether it was genuine or the product of a bot account. The change became apparent when the debut of The Lord of the Rings prequel series received negative reviews on numerous review aggregator websites.
A League of Their Own, an Amazon baseball comedy-drama series, debuted last month, and at the same time, the company quietly introduced the new policy. Variety, however, was only recently informed that The Rings of Power will be subject to the practice. All user reviews "posted to Prime Video" will undergo a three-day delay before becoming available online, claims its source. India currently lacks access to Prime Video's user review feature. Instead, it shows the film's IMDb rating, which for The Rings of Power is currently 6.6/10.
The Rings of Power received a mixed reception from audiences, with some praising it while others abhorring it completely. It has either a 10-star rating or a 1-star rating on IMDb, with very few reviews agreeing on the so-called "middle ground." For instance, The Lord of the Rings prequel series has 84 percent positive critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to 39 percent of user-submitted reviews as of this writing. Since its inception, The Rings of Power has had to contend with a bigoted audience who object to the casting of people of color as dwarves and elves, which was unusual in previous J.R.R. Tolkien screen adaptations.
Variety reports that in the case of the aforementioned A League of Their Own, Amazon's new initiative to "review its reviewers" appears to have been successful. On Prime Video, the program has received an average rating of 4.3/5 stars, with 14% of users giving it a 1-star rating. The sports dramedy currently has a positive 7.1 IMDb rating.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which debuted with its first two episodes, attracted 25 million viewers on day one, according to information released by Amazon on Sunday. The studio has never before made its internal TV ratings publicly available, though it is unclear exactly how the figures were determined.
The Rings of Power explores the extensive history surrounding the Second Age of Middle-earth and is set tens of thousands of years before the Peter Jackson movies. The series, which paves the way for the origin narrative of the Dark Lord Sauron, the One Ring's creator, is loosely based on Tolkien's literature rather than his main works. Morfydd Clark, Robert Arayamo (Mindhunter), Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Maxim Baldry, Owain Arthur, Nazanin Boniadi, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Charles Edwards (The Crown), Markella Kavenagh, and Charlie Vickers are among the ensemble cast members of the series.
Every Friday at 9:30am IST, new episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power air on Amazon Prime Video in India.
