Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings show is going to cover territory that is only ever hinted at in the books, staying away from Peter Jackson’s movies entirely, but that doesn’t mean Jeff Bezos is going to waste time deviating from things that the movies got absolutely right the first time around—for the sake of this sentence, let’s imagine that Rich Uncle Bezos is the guy making this show instead of its actual, surprisingly inexperienced showrunners. Anyway, Amazon announced today in a press release that, after what we can only assume was an exhaustive search all over the world, it has decided to film its Lord Of The Rings show in New Zealand… you know, the place where Peter Jackson filmed all of his Lord Of The Rings movies, establishing it as the place that looks like what we think Middle-earth would look like.
It’s a little cheap, since Jackson isn’t involved with this show and filming in New Zealand was kind of his thing, but filming a Lord Of The Rings show in some place other than New Zealand would be like making a Star Wars movie without a trip to the Tunisian desert. It’s just the thing you have to do.