Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Watch on:
Cinemax
LOTR director JA Bayona took over this beloved franchise with some iconic visuals that reference past movies and made long term fans smile.
If you want to prioritize further, Penny Dreadful pilot and Hannibal S3 are probably the first things to watch as they both take classic book stories & characters who have had feature films treatments, and have re-adapted for television.
Penny Dreadful is a psychological thriller that explores iconic literary characters like Dorian Gray and Frankenstein with origin stories in Victorian times. Amazon’s LOTR is based on Numenor in the Second Age of Middle-earth, and out of all the talented directors out there Amazon has chosen the pilot director of Penny Dreadful. It should be noted, Bayona did not direct any further episodes in the series. But these first two episode may give a sense of the tone we can expect in Numenor.
Breaking Bad is credited for creating the “peak television” era and LOTR writer Gennifer Hutchison was in an a leadership position in the writer’s room of that show and its spinoff Better Call Saul. For all we have heard she is a leading voice on LOTR, taking up the script writing mantle of Oscar winners Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens, to adapt Tolkien for an entirely new medium. Breaking Bad did very well at developing characters and delivering arcs that fulfilled early promises. It really is perfect television writing and we as fans are extremely lucky to have Gennifer involved.
Bonus: Westworld S1
Watch on:
HBO
Amazon has hired for LOTR the studio executives who greenlit Westworld, Thrones and Leftovers for HBO, so these can give a sense of the scale they expect from this show.
