Gen Z Doesn't Give a Shot About The Rings of Power
The audience is getting older.
It appears that Amazon's Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is struggling to attract young viewers. 71% of the show's audience is 35 years or older in the US, according to Nielsen's latest streaming data (via Business Insider).
This data point caused a lively discussion on Reddit, with people chiming in to provide explanations for it.
Most importantly, their personal anecdotes confirm what statistics reveal – Generation Z does not care that much about Tolkien. They grew up with Harry Potter and Percy Jackson instead, and currently their tastes ensure MCU 's popularity – and perhaps popularity of The Rings of Power's competitor, House of the Dragon, based on George Martin 's books, which stood atop all the more recent fantasy sagas aimed at more adult audiences.
The Lord of the Rings is not a cultural icon for their generation. A lot of zoomers were too young to even watch Peter Jackson's LotR films, as those released in theaters. And for those who weren't, the films were likely to be their sole point of connection with the Middle-Earth, given that by modern standards The Lord of the Rings is not a book very accessible to young readers – in fact, multiple Redditors in the thread have admitted to being unable to finish it.
That meant that among zoomers there are no or few "superfans", willing to read or watch anything and everything remotely associated with The Lord of the Rings, even if every episode makes them seethe (and yes, there are people in Tolkiens' fandom who watched The Rings of Power apparently only so that they can better elaborate all the reasons why they hate the series).
If Generation Z had some credit of goodwill towards the franchise from Jackson's movies, much of it likely was expended already on Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, which, albeit still successful at the box office, was widely agreed to fall short of the mark established by his LotR films.
To win the younger audiences, The Rings of Power series had to stand on its own merit and rely on positive word of mouth through the Internet, rather than on any sort of nostalgia. Statistics indicate that despite its lavish budget, The Rings of Power had failed to do so, or at least did so to a much lesser extent that its above-mentioned lavish budget suggested.