Interesting article, but there's a big mistake for LoTR fans

The Daily Mail just ran this article about the Amazon Lord of the Rings TV series, which is going to have a very impressive $1 billion dollar budget.

Lord Of The Rings: Amazon's TV series will become the most expensive show in history with a budget of $1 BILLION... beating Netflix's The Crown

Clearly, the budget for this series is partly based on the success of Game of Thrones, and the perceived appetite in the TV-watching community for sword and sorcery epics.  But there's a couple of differences between GoT and the Amazon LoTR.  GoT either had scenes that readers were looking forward to seeing (such as the infamous "Red Wedding"), or it is going where the books haven't gone yet (and may never), and hence there's a surprise factor.  I say that even though I saw the Riders of Rohan-style rescue of Jon Snow and his plucky band by the Knights of the Vale, even down to the horn blowing in the distance, coming from a long way off.

In contrast, this LoTR series is going to take place before the War of the Ring, which is described in the three LoTR novels.  Speaking of that, I want to tell the Daily Mail that the accepted title of the third book in the trilogy is entitled The Return of the King, not The King Returns (read the article).

Tolkien does describe the events between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring cursorily in the history appendices after the end of The Return of the King.  The thing is, these events weren't nearly as exciting as the events in the trilogy.  Furthermore, we know how it ends -- because it ends with the War of the Ring.  So how interesting and exciting is a story with no surprises and very few "big" events going to be?   Obviously Amazon is betting $1 bil that it will be interesting and exciting for enough people to be worth such a magnificent investment.  But I'm a big admirer of LoTR, and unless I hear that the Amazon LoTR series is magnificent, I'm likely not going to invest my time in it.