According to Amazon, no series on the Prime Video streaming service has started as successfully as “The Rings of Power”. The provider is also confronted with unsightly review bombing.
After Amazon was unable to achieve the desired success with its original “The Wheel of Time” last year, the streaming service’s hottest iron in the fight for the series throne started in September: “The Rings of Power”. The series is based on the work of the “Lord of the Rings” author JRR Tolkien and is technically located before his successful novels. During production, Amazon leaked almost nothing. A large-scale marketing strategy then followed in the weeks leading up to the release. And the calculation seems to work! According to Prime Video, “The Rings of Power” got off to a dream start in terms of viewership. However, the provider also has to deal with hate comments.
Successful start of “The Rings of Power”
In fact, hardly anyone should have avoided the Amazon series “The Rings of Power” in the past few weeks. The show was almost omnipresent. Accordingly – and of course also because of the popularity of Tolkien’s work – the first episodes were awaited with particular excitement. Right off the bat, Amazon released two episodes at once through its own streaming service, Prime Video. Now the long episodes come in weekly cycles; always on Fridays.
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Apparently, the series meets with great interest among viewers. Usually, Amazon doesn’t hold its breath when it comes to accurate streaming numbers. The company has now released detailed information for “The Rings of Power” for the first time. As a result, the first two episodes have already been streamed by over 25 million viewers worldwide within just 24 hours. that be like Amazon, the most successful premiere ever on Prime Video. Of course, the figures should be taken with a pinch of salt as they cannot be verified in any other way, but they are by no means unrealistic.
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Amazon bans comments for review bombing
So, as encouraging as Amazon’s viewership numbers may be, the series has sparked heated debate. Overall, the reviews for “The Rings of Power” were balanced to positive. However, there were also a number of bad ratings – and hate comments.
This is due to so-called review bombing. Basically, the term describes the cumulative and sometimes organized criticism of a game, a series, a film, etc. Users network for this and give masses of bad ratings from different accounts. In the case of “The Rings of Power” it should be emphasized that it is not about so-called qualitative review bombing.
The hate comments often have the diverse cast of the series as their subject. For example, the Puerto Rican actor Ismael Cruz plays the Elven warrior Arondir. The main character of the series, Galadriel, is also female, which annoys many in arch-conservative platforms such as the US “RedState”. Even before the start of “The Rings of Power” there was a lot of excitement in Tolkien fan forums as to whether the cast would not actively contradict the template.
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In order to counteract these hate comments and bad ratings, Amazon has now deactivated the rating function on its own platform for 72 hours. One wanted to achieve that tempers could cool down a bit. In addition, one can filter out inappropriate hate comments in a targeted manner. At times, for example, the user rating at Metacritic was only 1.9. In contrast, the press gave the series a significantly better rating of 71 out of 100 points. So far, however, the comments do not seem to have harmed the success of “The Rings of Power”.