The Rings of Power season 2 will enter full production very soon
Even though the first season of The Rings of Power has just recently been made available on Prime Video, the show’s cast and crew are already making preparations for the upcoming second season. If you’ve been keeping up with the progress of The Rings of Power, the news that there will be a second season coming soon won’t come as much of a shock to you. According to Deadline, Amazon Studios gave its Lord of the Rings adaptation a green light for a second season in November 2019 (opens in a new tab). This was not only an indication of how confident the company was in its adaptation of the book, but it was also a decision that would have allowed the cast and crew to film seasons 1 and 2 consecutively.
Those ambitions were thwarted by COVID-19, which is a great shame. Before the global pandemic in March 2020 caused the show to be put on indefinite pause, it had only been in full production in New Zealand for a month. Principal photography was resumed in May 2020, and it was determined that filming would be finished in August 2021. The government of New Zealand published these new safety recommendations. Production on the second season of The Rings of Power will soon begin, provided that the upcoming weeks do not bring up any issues of a similar nature or a fresh outbreak of COVID-19. According to Time magazine (opens in a new tab), it is anticipated that production will begin in October 2022. This time frame aligns with what Weber told TechRadar about when filming would start.
However, in contrast to the first season or any of the live-action Lord of the Rings films that have come before it, the subsequent episodes of the Prime Video series will not be shot in New Zealand. Instead, production will move to the United Kingdom, with Bray Film Studios in Berkshire and Bovingdon Airfield in Hemel Hempstead reportedly serving as the primary locations for set-based filming. Variety (opens in a new tab) reports this information.
The co-showrunners of the show, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, revealed to Entertainment Weekly (opens in a new tab) that they had been researching filming locations in the United Kingdom as recently as the month of June. It has been reported in The Guardian (opens in a new tab) that Scotland was considered a leading contender for shooting sequences on site. However, it is not known whether this is still the case. In any case, you can expect Amazon to announce in the near future that the second season of The Rings of Power has started filming.