Two high-profile, big-budget fantasy series namely ‘House of the Dragon’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ recently made their grand premieres on the HBO Max / Disney+ Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video OTT platforms, respectively, with a gap of around ten days. The overlapping release of the ongoing shows have made comparisons from audiences inevitable.
So far, HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ have aired three out of ten episodes while Prime Video’s ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ have released two out of a total of eight episodes. And if we compare the IMDb user ratings for the released episodes of these two shows, it fetches interesting results.
‘House of the Dragon’ IMDb ratings:
E1: The Heirs of the Dragon – 8.8/10 (50k votes)
E2: The Rogue Prince – 8.5/10 (34k votes)
E3: Second of his Name – 9/10 (28k votes)
Overall IMDb rating – 8.8/10 (96k votes)
‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ IMDb rating:
E1: A Shadow of the Past – 7.4/10 (30k votes)
E2: Adrift – 7.4 (25k votes)
Overall IMDb rating – 6.8/10 (112k votes)
So, as you can see from the above IMDB ratings for both the shows, HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ has scored significantly higher compared to ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ in terms of IMDb user ratings for individual episodes and the shows’ overall ratings as well.
However, one interesting thing about the IMDb user rating for ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ is that almost 25% of the users have rated the show 1/10 on the Amazon owned website IMDb. This review bombing was apparently done because of the widespread ‘anti-woke’ backlash against the show for diverse casting in the prequel series.
For a better perspective, in ‘House of the Dragon’, a significantly lower percentage of around 5% users have rated the show 1/10. So, the IMDb ratings for ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ might, in reality, be much higher than the current average rating of 6.8/10.
It would be really interesting to see how the IMDb ratings for both these shows eventually turn out to be after their respective conclusions and whether Amazon will take further action to filter out fake reviews on IMDb for ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’.
About the shows:
House of the Dragon
The series is based on George R. R. Martin’s 2018 fantasy novel ‘Fire & Blood’ and the goings-on takes place around two centuries before the events of ‘Game of Thrones’ and revolves around the beginning of the end of House Targaryen.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel ‘The Lord of the Rings’, the epic fantasy series takes place thousands of years before the events of the book and Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’. The series would focus on the legends pertaining to major events that happened in the fabled Second Age of Middle Earth.