Amazon’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ Resumes Production In New Zealand, Netflix’s ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Next

by Deadline — September 28, 2020

Filming has just resumed in New Zealand on Amazon’s sprawling The Lord Of The Rings TV series, an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels, I have learned. Production on Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop is slated to restart on Wednesday, Sept. 30, in the island country where Netflix’s Sweet Tooth has been shooting since Sept. 14, sources said. The three shows were among handful of Hollywood TV series and movies that were granted border exemptions by the New Zealand government in July to film in the country.

The West Auckland-based The Lord Of the Rings was close to finishing the first two episodes, directed by J.A. Bayona, when production shut down in mid-March amid the escalating global pandemic. As Deadline reported late last year, in conjunction with an early Season 2 renewal for the big-budget fantasy drama, the LOTR series was scheduled to go on a 4-5-month hiatus after filming the first two episodes, so the shutdown segued into the planned hiatus, timed to coincide with the New Zealand winter. The writing team of the series, led by showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, used the time to map out and write Season 2 scripts. Prep work on the Amazon Studios-produced The Lord of The Rings had been underway in New Zealand for the past couple of months.

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