The Rings of Power is Already Dethroned by Nolan's Latest
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power spent only six weeks as the number one piece of content streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Now it has already been dethroned by a newly arrived series – The Peripheral. The Peripheral, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, and with Westworld 's creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy serving as executive producers, is based on the book of the same name, written by William Gibson.
As you can already guess, it depicts another variant of future, where technologies had altered our society deeply. It is focused on struggles of Flynne Fisher (Moretz), a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow's America. For now The Peripheral has only two episodes available, with more to arrive weekly, but it still managed to reach the top spot, beating out The Rings of Power.
At first The Rings of Power seemed to skyrocket in ratings on Amazon Prime Video. It was reported that after just one day of its first two episodes being available, the show had already broken multiple records across Prime Video. But then some problems became noticeable.
While Nielsen, the third party tracker of streaming, noted that The Rings of Power were consistently beating its chief fantasy competitor, HBO's House of the Dragon, it should be noted that a major part of HBO audience is still watching cable TV, instead of streaming their shows.
Then Nielsen recorded The Rings of Power getting beaten soundly in streaming ratings by Cobra Kai, once the latter's Season 5 was released (via THR). And now, even on Prime Video, The Rings of Power is unseated from its throne.
Now, it is, of course, normal for a new show to be watched more than old ones. But unless The Peripheral ends up a sudden mega-success, this happening so fast indicates that The Rings of Power may indeed be underperforming.
At least relative to its budget and expectations placed on it – while there is no doubt, that The Rings of Power is one of the most popular and most viewed shows of this year, it is a very-high profile production, with reported Season 1's budget of $450 million, so Amazon probably expected more from it than being just "one of" the most popular shows.