Amazon has delayed user reviews of its new Lord of the Rings show, The Rings of Power, to combat trolls and a spree of bombing reviews.
In an effort partly to tackle highly unfavourable reviews from people complaining about the diverse casting in the Amazon Prime prequel series, the company has added a 72-hour delay to all reviews from users on its platform.
As of Monday morning (AEST), The Rings of Power had no customer reviews, despite the first two episodes being released globally last Friday.
Amazon confirmed to Variety it had quietly added the measure, while also stopping users from posting a review until they had seen the show.
Since its release, The Rings of Power has been criticised by some for its diverse cast, with some suggesting J.R.R Tolkien would have despised the changes made to his world.
Morfydd Clark, who plays a young Galadriel, addressed the criticism at the weekend, labelling it “nonsense“.
“[Tolkien] was a really complex person who wrote a really complex world, and this idea that anyone could know exactly what he would’ve wanted or what he would’ve liked is, I feel, nonsense,” she said.
But while media outlets report the series “appears to have been bombed”, not every negative review has come from a digital goblin.
The show has received high praise from critics with an average rating of 84 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, while the average audience score is at a low 39 per cent.
Popular Tolkien fandom reviews have voiced strong opinions about the lack of “Tolkienisms” represented in The Rings of Power.
It has been criticised for using Tolkien’s characters and universe to create a generic high-class fantasy to rival the House of Dragons.
The series is set in Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth at a time known as the Second Age, a period 4000 years before the events in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit novels and films.
The show does not have permission to use much of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings plot, with most of the details coming from his appendices or Unfinished Tales from The Second Age.
Amazon plans to let the full story unfold in 50 hours over five seasons.
The online retailer spent more than $US465 million ($683 million) producing the show’s first season. It is among the most expensive TV series produced and the most ambitious since Amazon jumped into original programming in 2013.
More than 25 million viewers around the world watched the prequel series on its first day.
Future Rings of Power instalments will launch weekly until the October 14 season finale.
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