Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Prequel Series Creative Team Includes Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad Producers, Oscar Winners

Amazon Prime Video has announced the full creative team of its Lord of the Rings prequel series. It includes Bruce Richmond (Game of Thrones), Gene Kelly (Boardwalk Empire), Lindsey Weber (Star Trek Beyond), and Amazon's former head of genre programming Sharon Tal Yguado as executive producers; Gennifer Hutchison (Breaking Bad), Jason Cahill (The Sopranos), and Justin Doble (Stranger Things) as writers and executive producers; Bryan Cogman (Game of Thrones) and Stephany Folsom (Toy Story 4) as consulting producers; Ron Ames (The Departed) as co-producer; Helen Shang (Hannibal) as writer and co-producer; and Glenise Mullins (Terminator Genisys) as writing consultant.

Additionally, the behind-the-scenes crew on Amazon's Lord of the Rings prequel series includes Oscar-winning production designer Rick Heinrichs (Star Wars: The Last Jedi); Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Jason Smith (The Avengers); costume designer Kate Hawley (Suicide Squad); Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey; and illustrator and concept artist John Howe (Lord of the Rings film trilogy). The 17 new additions join the previously announced showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and director J.A. Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), who will direct the first two episodes, and executive produce with his producing partner Belén Atienza.

“This team is our Fellowship — assembled from around the world, all walking the road together to try and accomplish something far greater than any of us could on our own,” Payne and McKay said in a prepared statement over the weekend. “We feel humbled and extremely lucky to be surrounded by such inspiring and talented women and men.”

While we now know about the creative team in place, there's still very little we know about the cast and narrative. Markella Kavenagh was reportedly hired as the first cast member last week, and the prequel series will be set during the Second Age, which is hundreds or thousands of years before the events of the first Lord of the Rings movie.

Production is being handled by Amazon Studios, in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins — the publisher of The Lord of the Rings books — and New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros. that worked on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Amazon hopes to have The Lord of the Rings prequel series on the air in 2021. Per an earlier report, it must go into production two years from when the deal was signed, which sets the deadline as late 2019.