Amazon spent $1 billion turning The Lord of the Rings into a diversity lecture – and lost 63 percent of its audience.
Now the director of the new Lord of the Rings film is doing things differently.
What Serkis told the BBC this week is something Hollywood hasn't heard in years – and it's driving them absolutely crazy.
Serkis Draws a Line Hollywood Refuses to Draw
The BBC asked Serkis point-blank why The Hunt for Gollum has cast only white actors so far.
His answer was simple.
Tolkien built Middle-earth on Norse mythology.
The Shire, Serkis explained, feels like a place where people are deeply insular – "not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don't want people coming in."
He then delivered the line that sent Hollywood's diversity police into a full meltdown.
"We don't think we will be doing a politically correct just-casting-for-the-sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film," he said.
https://twitter.com/RottenTomatoes/status/2077107972925251899?s=20
Six words summarize what Hollywood has spent a decade refusing to say: story comes before ideology.
The cast Serkis assembled makes that case on its own.
Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf.
Elijah Wood comes back as Frodo.
Jamie Dornan steps in as Aragorn, with Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Winslet, and Leo Woodall rounding out a star-studded lineup.
None of them were cast to satisfy a quota.
All of them were cast to tell a story.
Amazon Already Ran This Experiment and Lost
This is not a new debate.
Amazon had the same argument in 2022, chose the opposite path, and watched it collapse in real time.
The Rings of Power went all-in on diversity – Black Elves, diverse Dwarves, a cast assembled to check every possible box.
It cost Amazon over $1 billion.
But audiences walked away, and the show lost an estimated 63 percent of its viewers over the course of its first season.
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Only 37 percent of Americans finished it.
Amazon was so rattled by the review scores that it delayed user ratings by up to three days to slow the damage.
When the show launched, Elon Musk had already seen enough: "Tolkien is turning in his grave."
He was right.
The Rings of Power failed because the people who made it cared more about optics than storytelling – and viewers could smell it from the first episode.
Hollywood Has Already Proven This Pattern Works One Way
Serkis isn't operating in a vacuum.
Snow White lost over $100 million after Disney spent years apologizing for the story's traditional elements and lecturing audiences about what Snow White should have been.
Ghostbusters, Terminator: Dark Fate, Disney's Strange World – one after another, the studios that buried story under messaging watched audiences walk out.
Serkis just made a different bet.
He bet that Tolkien fans – the millions of people who have watched Peter Jackson's trilogy dozens of times, who own the extended editions, who still argue about whether the Balrog has wings – care more about faithful storytelling than they care about a casting press release.
He's right.
What the Woke Crowd Never Understood About Tolkien
His world is not a blank canvas for modern ideology.
It is a fully realized mythology – one that Tolkien spent decades building, drawing on ancient Norse and Anglo-Saxon sources, with its own internal logic, geography, and racial history.
The Shire is not Montana in 1985 – but it is a specific place, a specific culture, with specific people shaped by specific circumstances.
Forcing modern diversity politics onto that world doesn't make it more inclusive.
It makes it less Tolkien.
The audiences who rejected Rings of Power weren't rejecting diversity.
They were rejecting a production team that treated Tolkien's world as a problem to be corrected rather than a story to be told.
Serkis is treating it as a story to be told.
The Hunt for Gollum hits theaters December 17, 2027.
Based on what Serkis said this week, it's shaping up to be the first Lord of the Rings project in years that trusts the audience.
That's not a small thing.
That might be everything.
Sources:
- Madison Colombo, "Director of new 'Lord of the Rings' rejects 'politically correct' casting after suggestions film is too White," Fox News, July 14, 2026.
- "Despite Strong Reviews Amazon's 'Rings of Power' Suffers Viewership Collapse," Bleeding Fool, September 2024.
- John Nolte, "Rings of Power Lost 63 Percent of Its Audience," Breitbart, November 2022.
