While “The Rings of Power” is set thousands of years before the events of “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Hobbit” and in a separate continuity altogether, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any shared connections between the two distinctly different time periods in Middle-earth history. Some familiar faces, previously-seen locales, and that same Dark Lord Sauron hanging over it all will all help fans get their bearings when the time comes to contextualize where “The Rings of Power” fits in the overall timeline. But what if Prime Video had instead taken a much more direct route altogether?

In a new interview with Total Film, “The Rings of Power” co-showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay were asked about the could-have-been’s that might have come to fruition had the decisionmakers chose differently. Somewhat surprisingly, Payne indicates that anything and everything was on the table.

“When we first went up for the job, we were told there were literally dozens of other people who were also throwing their hat in the ring, and everyone was coming in with different things. Amazon bought the rights to the trilogy, the appendices, and ‘The Hobbit.’ They said the field was wide open — any story within that material, you could tell. So you had people pitching the Young Aragon show, or the Gimli spinoff, or other kinds of things.”

In addition to confirming previous reports, this quote also gives quite a bit of insight into just what material Prime Video is able to dip into (as I reported here while on the ground at Comic-Con).

We’ll find out on September 2, 2022 whether “The Rings of Power” proves to be, as Payne puts it, “worthy of Tolkien.”