#ufc
#Song Yadong
Eighth-ranked bantamweight fighter Song Yadong will be eager to reassert himself in the Octagon after falling to Cory Sandhagen at UFC Vegas 60 Read More
The first season of Amazon’s high-budget series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an adaptation of legendary fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, wrapped up on October 14. Like other audiences around the globe, fans in China had mixed feelings about the show, although Chinese review sites were seemingly spared the onslaught of negative critiques that plagued some Western platforms.
More than 17,000 Chinese viewers rated the show on the review platform Douban, giving it an average rating of 6.8/10. Meanwhile, The Rings of Power holds a disappointing audience score of just 39% on the American review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes and 6.9/10 on IMDb.
Following the initial release of The Rings of Power, the series suffered from a phenomenon called review-bombing, where displeased fans gave the show extremely low ratings for a range of reasons, from anger over Black characters to a belief that the plot strayed from author J.R.R. Tolkien’s canon.
To combat review-bombing, Amazon took the unusual step of temporarily suspending the review function on its Amazon Prime Video streaming service.
The lukewarm response to The Rings of Power has not lived up to the legacy of Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in China, which enjoy considerably higher Douban ratings and set impressive box office records.
Amazon’s adaptation of the storied fantasy novels has even failed to surpass the Douban rating of Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated reimagining of The Lord of the Rings, which currently holds 8.8/10 on the review site.
Many Chinese viewers felt there was not enough action in the first season. One user of the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo wrote, “The settings were beautiful, but overall the show was a letdown. It was nearly 10 hours long, but the only big scene was a volcanic eruption.”
A Douban reviewer, who gave the show a favorable rating, wrote that the season felt like a “large-scale preview.”
An apparent redeeming quality of The Rings of Power was the reveal of big baddy Sauron in the finale, which some referred to as “the best episode of the series,” and left watchers excited for the second season.
Other conflicting comments by Weibo users included those calling the series “flat,” “the best fantasy epic in years,” and “pretty good.”
The Rings of Power reportedly has four more seasons to shut up the naysayers, with season two likely arriving sometime in 2024.
All images via IMDb
#ufc
#Song Yadong
Eighth-ranked bantamweight fighter Song Yadong will be eager to reassert himself in the Octagon after falling to Cory Sandhagen at UFC Vegas 60 Read More
#influencer
Not all heroes wear capes: Xu Yajun created the brand and charity Super Girl to provide free menstrual products to girls in rural parts of Southwest China’s Yunnan province Read More
#celebrities
A bad boy onscreen and the boy next door in real life, 23-year-old star Dylan Wang found massive success in 2022’s ‘Love Between Fairy and Devil’ Read More
#gaming
#Blizzard Entertainment
A sign of the times: ‘World of Warcraft’ statues and displays were demolished at the NetEase office complex, and the destruction was livestreamed on China’s version of TikTok Read More
#celebrities
#Chinese New Year
From Angelina Jolie to Kendrick Lamar to Michael Jordan and Elliot Page: Here are eight celebrities born in the Year of the Rabbit Read More