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Published Nov 12, 2026, 6:00 PM EST
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Adapting J.R.R. Tolkien is never going to be an easy job, particularly when you're dealing with a story that spans thousands of years, introduces entire civilizations, and features enough characters to populate several television shows. That's the challenge The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has faced since its debut, with the Prime Video fantasy epic juggling storylines involving Elves, Dwarves, Númenóreans, Harfoots, and the increasingly troublesome Sauron. While the series has certainly never lacked ambition, keeping all those moving parts together hasn't always been straightforward. And now, one of the people responsible for bringing Middle-earth to television has acknowledged that the show may have been asking a little too much of its audience.
Speaking exclusively with Collider's Maggie Lovitt for an episode of our Behind the Scenes series, The Rings of Power co-showrunner Patrick McKay admitted that the first two seasons occasionally tried to juggle too many storylines, revealing that Season 3 has been deliberately designed to bring the narrative into sharper focus. Rather than continuing to expand the show's enormous collection of characters and subplots, McKay and fellow showrunner J.D. Payne have made Sauron's creation of the One Ring the central event around which everything else revolves. He told Collider:
"You would think that would be one of the real challenges of this show, but actually, the challenge is trying to keep it small. J.D., my co-showrunner, and I have imaginations that we don't know how to stop. They are these waterfalls of ideas, and really we're constantly trying to focus them and make sure we're not asking too much of an audience. I think there were times in prior seasons that, just being our own harshest critics, we realized looking back we were juggling too many balls.
We were asking the audience to juggle too many balls. We're so close to it; it makes perfect sense to us. But one of the things this season we really tried to do is focus it. This is the season where Sauron makes the One Ring. Everything should tie into that. And if it doesn't, even if it delights us, maybe that's not the time for that story."
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Movies/Academy Awards/Best Picture
Collider · Best Picture
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?
Five winners · ten questions · one envelope
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be and what it can do to you. One of them is the film made for the way your mind works, and ten questions will work out which. The nominees
2020Parasite
2023Everything Everywhere All at Once
2024Oppenheimer
2015Birdman
2008No Country for Old Men
Open the envelope
Question 01 of 10TONE
01 What kind of film experience are you really after? The best movies do not just entertain. They leave something behind.
ASomething that pulls the rug out, that makes me think I am watching one kind of film and then reveals I am watching another entirely. BSomething overwhelming: funny, sad, absurd and genuinely moving, all at once. CSomething grand and weighty, a film that makes me feel the full scale of what I am watching. DSomething formally daring, a film that pushes what cinema can even do. ESomething lean and relentless, pure tension with no wasted frame.
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Question 02 of 10THEME
02 Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What is yours?
AClass, inequality, and what people are willing to do when desperation meets opportunity. BIdentity, family, and the chaos of holding your life together while everything falls apart. CGenius, moral responsibility, and the catastrophic weight of a decision you can never take back. DEgo, legacy, and the terror of becoming irrelevant while you are still alive to watch it happen. EEvil, chance, and whether moral order exists at all or we just tell ourselves it does.
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Question 03 of 10STRUCTURE
03 How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
AGenre-twisting. I want it to start in one lane and migrate into something completely different. BMaximalist and genre-blending: comedy, action, drama and sci-fi in one ride. CEpic and non-linear, cutting between timelines to build a mosaic of cause and consequence. DA single unbroken flow. I want to feel like I am living it in real time with no cuts to safety. ESpare and precise, every scene doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing more.
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Question 04 of 10VILLAIN
04 What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
AA system: invisible, structural, and almost impossible to fight because it has no single face. BThe self, and the ways we sabotage, abandon and fail the people we love most. CHistory, and the unstoppable momentum of events no single person can stop or redirect. DThe industry, the machinery of culture that chews up talent and spits out irrelevance. EPure, implacable evil, a force so certain of itself it becomes almost philosophical.
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Question 05 of 10ENDING
05 What do you want from a film's ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
AShock and inevitability, a conclusion that recontextualizes everything before it. BEarned emotion. I want to cry, laugh and feel hopeful, even if the world is a mess. CDevastation and grandeur, an ending that leaves me sitting in silence for a few minutes. DAmbiguity, something open enough that I am still turning it over days later. EBleakness, an honest refusal to pretend the world is tidier than it is.
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Question 06 of 10WORLD
06 Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything: mood, stakes, what is even possible.
AA gleaming modern city with a hidden underside, beauty masking rot and wealth masking desperation. BA collapsing suburban life that opens onto something infinite, the multiverse inside one ordinary person. CThe corridors of power and science at a world-historical turning point, where decisions echo for decades. DThe grimy, alive chaos of New York and Hollywood, fame as both destination and trap. EVast, indifferent landscape, desert and highway where violence arrives without warning or reason.
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Question 07 of 10CRAFT
07 What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature, the element that makes it unmistakable.
AProduction design and mise-en-scène, every frame composed to carry meaning beneath the surface. BEditing and tonal control, the ability to move between registers without losing the audience. CScore and sound design, music that becomes inseparable from the dread and awe of what you see. DCinematography as performance, the camera not recording events but taking part in them. ESilence and restraint, what is left unsaid doing more work than any dialogue could.
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Question 08 of 10PROTAGONIST
08 What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you follow says something about you.
ASomeone smart and resourceful who makes increasingly dangerous decisions under pressure. BSomeone overwhelmed and ordinary who turns out to be capable of something extraordinary. CA brilliant, tortured figure whose gifts and flaws cannot be separated from each other. DA self-destructive artist whose ego is both their superpower and their undoing. EA quiet, principled person trying to make sense of a world that has stopped making sense.
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Question 09 of 10PACE
09 How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint. Others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
AI love a slow build when the payoff is going to be seismic. Patience for a devastating reveal. BGive me relentless momentum. I want to feel breathless and emotionally spent by the end. CEpic runtime does not scare me. If the material demands three hours, give me three hours. DI want it propulsive even when nothing is technically happening, restless energy throughout. EDeliberate and unhurried. I want dread to accumulate in the spaces between the action.
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Question 10 of 10AFTERMATH
10 What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
AUnsettled, like I have just seen something I cannot fully explain and cannot stop thinking about. BMoved and energized, like the film reminded me what matters and gave me something to hold onto. CHumbled, like I have been in the presence of something important and overwhelming. DExhilarated, like I have just watched cinema do something it has never quite done before. EHaunted, like a cold, quiet dread that stays with me for days.
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Reveal my film
The envelope, pleaseAnd the Oscar goes to
★ Best Picture, 2020 Parasite Bong Joon-ho, 2019 A film that hides its true intentions until the moment it is ready to reveal them.
You are drawn to films that operate on several levels at once, that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image. From the Collider file
- The first film not in the English language to win Best Picture, in the Academy's 92-year history to that point.
- It took four Oscars in one night: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature.
- It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019 by a unanimous jury vote, the first Korean film to do so.
- The Park family's modernist house was not a location. It was built from scratch on an outdoor lot.
Reads between the lines Loves a reveal Attention to detail
★ Best Picture, 2023 Everything Everywhere All at Once Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022 A film that refuses to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful.
You want it all, and this one gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is among the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse science fiction, family drama, existential crisis, and an emotional core that sneaks up on you in the middle of the chaos. You respond to ambition. Being overwhelmed is the design, not the side effect, because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what the film is about. From the Collider file
- Seven Oscars, including three acting wins for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis.
- Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress.
- The visual effects were handled by a team of fewer than ten people, most of them self-taught.
- Ke Huy Quan had all but left acting for two decades before this role brought him back.
Wants everything Big swings Soft center
★ Best Picture, 2024 Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan, 2023 A film about the gap between what we can do and what we should do.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale, films that treat history not as a backdrop but as a force, then place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer sits inside one of the most consequential moments in human history and refuses to look away from it. You want your films to feel important without being self-important, earning their ambition through craft and the gravity of the subject. This one is enormous, complicated, and offers no easy comfort. From the Collider file
- Seven Oscars, including Nolan's first wins for directing and for Best Picture.
- Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. both took their first Academy Awards for it.
- Kodak engineered a black-and-white 65mm stock that did not previously exist so Nolan could shoot those sequences on IMAX.
- A three-hour, R-rated drama about theoretical physics that passed 950 million dollars worldwide.
Thinks in decades Scale and weight No easy comfort
★ Best Picture, 2015 Birdman Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014 A film doing something that probably should not be possible.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction, where the how of the filmmaking becomes part of the what it is about. Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman, stitched to appear as one continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera make something unlike anything else: a film about creativity, relevance, self-destruction and never quite knowing whether your work means anything at all. From the Collider file
- Four Oscars, among them Best Picture and Best Director for Iñárritu.
- Emmanuel Lubezki's win here was the middle of three consecutive cinematography Oscars, after Gravity and before The Revenant.
- Antonio Sánchez's improvised drum score was ruled ineligible for the score category, which caused a minor uproar.
- The long-take illusion was built from a handful of extended shots joined by hidden cuts.
Formally daring Camera as character Ego and art
★ Best Picture, 2008 No Country for Old Men Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007 A film that treats dread as a form of meaning.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, refuses to explain itself, and lets unease do the talking. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is about the arrival of a new kind of evil: implacable, arbitrary, and indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of things. It is one of the most tightly controlled films ever made, and that control is the source of the terror. You want your films to haunt you rather than comfort you, and you have no interest in a resolution that would be a lie. From the Collider file
- Four Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
- Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, with much of his dialogue carried over intact.
- Carter Burwell's score runs about sixteen minutes and is nearly inaudible by design.
- Roger Deakins was nominated twice that year, for this and The Assassination of Jesse James, and won for neither.
Trusts silence Dread over answers No tidy endings
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Less Is More in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' Season 3
It's a wild admission to make, but it's one that makes a lot of sense, because the One Ring is, well, the One Ring. And it should be the focus of a show called The Rings of Power. The decision to focus the third season around the One Ring also reflects the show's broader approach to adapting Tolkien's Second Age, which contains major historical events separated by enormous stretches of time.
"We looked at the text, we looked at the history of this particular era of the mythology, and there were these series of events that to us felt like they could lead one right into the next, right into the next, and build momentum with an audience the way that a serialized show should," explained McKay. "And then really the work that we do is taking those fixed points, whether it's the forging of the One Ring — that's a big moment this season — or it's Pharazôn bringing a massive Númenórean army to Middle-earth — that's a big moment this season — and there's others. And then it's about, 'How do we make those feel like earned emotional turns in a story rather than fixed historical events, if that makes sense?'" He went on to say:
"We want to bring audiences to it who maybe aren't anticipating those moments or don't know that they're going to come. If you're a Tolkien superfan and a lover of the books and a scholar of the lore, in theory, there's all kinds of things in every episode that you're responding to and picking out that we're dangling there, whether it's an Easter egg or a huge historical moment, like you're saying. But also, for my mother, who's never really gotten Lord of the Rings, it's not her thing, it should play like a novel does, where it's an emotional experience even if it wasn't in Middle-earth."
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 3 is streaming on Prime Video. You can watch McKay's full episode of Collider Behind the Scenes above.Stay tuned to Collider for all the latest news and updates on the biggest and best movies and shows heading to your favorite streaming platforms soon.
Release Date September 1, 2022
Network Amazon Prime Video
Showrunner John D. Payne, Patrick McKay
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Ismael Cruz Cordova
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English (US) ·