Peter Jackson claims that Amazon's Lord of the Rings series "ghosted" him

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The Oscar-winning director of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies reveals the studio asked him to be involved with its upcoming megabudget series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and promised to send him scripts — then never contacted him again.

“They asked me if I wanted to be involved — [writer-producer Fran Walsh] and I — and I said, ‘That’s an impossible question to answer without seeing a script,'” Jackson recalled to Scott Feinberg on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. “So they said, ‘As soon as we get the first couple scripts, we’ll send them to you.’ And the scripts never showed up. That’s the last thing I heard, which is fine. No complaints at all.”

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Sources close to the project describe a complicated and delicate backstory to the situation. First, that the studio has high regard for Jackson, and that Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have privately attempted to make overtures to the filmmaker. But as the statement suggests, there were also legal concerns about keeping the films (which are owned by Warner Bros.) and TV show separate. There have been executive changes during the time period in question, as well, with former head of genre programming Sharon Tal Yguado — whom one source described as an advocate of luring Jackson to the project — departing the company in 2019. Perhaps even more crucially, sources say author J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate was against having Jackson on board. This shouldn’t be surprising, as the estate had no involvement with his films and Christopher Tolkien has previously slammed the trilogy in the press as “eviscerating” his father’s books, claiming they turned his novels into action movies for young people that lack “beauty and seriousness.” But the estate is involved with the series — Amazon paid the estate an astounding $250 million for the rights to make the show. All that said: One does not simply offer to send Peter Jackson a LOTR script and then leave the man hanging.

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