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How Rings of Power and House of the Dragon Compare in Rotten Tomatoes
Amazon's Middle-earth prequel, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and HBO's Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, released at almost exactly the same time and are earning (mostly) similar critical scores in Rotten Tomatoes. It's rare for directly competing TV shows to premiere so close to each other, even in the streaming era, so with two streamers duking it out with live action adaptations of two of the most popular fantasy franchises in the world, how are critics rating each show?
Game of Thrones enjoyed a massively popular eight-season run on HBO from 2011-2019, so House of the Dragon is a clear attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the show based on George R. R. Martin's books, and while The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power fulfills a very similar concept as a prequel to J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, there are some clear differences. Both series expand their respective stories based on additional canonical lore instead of adapting specific stories, but while House of the Dragon benefits from serving as a direct prequel to an already established series, The Rings of Power isn't arriving immediately after popular Lord of the Rings TV show and could only be considered a spiritual prequel at best to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, which released in the early 2000s and the early 2010s, respectively.
This recency bias may work in favor of House of the Dragon since Game of Thrones is still fresh in people's minds, while The Rings Of Power have to introduce audiences to an entirely new era of a world they haven't been as recently invested in. Lord of the Rings has a dedicated fanbase for both the books and the movies, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books have outsold Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire several times over (with the help of a healthy head start). Regardless, the reception of the concurrently released fantasy prequel shows will be telling, so how do their scores compare in Rotten Tomatoes?
House of the Dragon Has a (Slightly) Higher Rotten Tomatoes Score Than The Rings of Power
With two episodes out for each show, the Rotten Tomatoes scores for The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon are almost a perfect tie, with House of the Dragon taking a one-point lead on its 85 percent Rotten Tomatoes critic score compared to The Rings Of Power's 84 percent. Interestingly, House of the Dragon's first episode scored 87 percent in Rotten Tomatoes, which is three points higher than The Rings of Power's premiere debut of 84 percent, although the second episodes of each show are exactly tied at 86 percent. The Rings of Power will see a total of eight episodes for its first season, while House of the Dragon will have 10, so there's still a lot of time to see how these scores shake out through the remainder of their respective first seasons.
Comparatively, both shows come in lower than the Game of Thrones debut season Rotten Tomatoes score of 90 percent, which was the lowest scoring season of Game of Thrones prior to the hugely divisive eighth season, which scored a 55 percent. When it comes to the first two episodes of Game of Thrones, both scored 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, so clearly the big-budget fantasy television genre has a high bar for success.
Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics Prefer The Rings of Power over House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon may have the slightest edge over The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power when it comes to the all critics Tomatometer score, but Rotten Tomatoes' specially selected "Top Critics" actually hold a clear preference for The Rings of Power. Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics gave The Rings of Power's first episode 81 percent and the second episode 86 percent for an average of 84 percent, while House of the Dragon's first two episodes received 79 percent and 75 percent from Top Critics for an average of 77 percent.
Reviews are all subjective, even from critics, so Rotten Tomatoes' Top Critics score isn't inherently more important than other critics scores, but it's still a revealing metric about the overall reception to each show. While not universally true, Top Critics tend to belong to bigger publications and don't always put the same emphasis on things like lore or Easter eggs and instead judge the storytelling and artistry, while the "all critics" Tomatometer score displayed prominently in front of every show or movie on Rotten Tomatoes is often more indicative of entertainment value, although there are always exceptions in both cases.
Rings of Power's Audience Score is Way Lower Than House of the Dragon, Was Rotten Tomatoes Review Bombed?
The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon may be neck and neck when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes' critic and Top Critic scores, but House of the Dragon's 84 percent audience score is a full 45 points higher than The Rings of Power's 39 percent audience score, but it looks like the latter may be the victim of a Rotten Tomatoes review bomb. It's not uncommon for movies to see splits between the critic and audience scores as wide as The Rings of Power's, although some other details about the Rotten Tomatoes data for these reviews makes it a bit of an anomaly compared to similar shows.
House of the Dragon's 84 percent audience score comes thanks to 3,522 user ratings, which is a bit lower than Game of Thrones' 7,563 user review average per season, but with only two episodes in that makes sense. Meanwhile, The Rings of Power's 39 percent audience score is the product of 16,833 user ratings. Considering both series saw comparatively popular releases on their respective platforms, the drastic mismatch in the number of user reviews, especially considering House of the Dragon released a few weeks before The Rings of Power is clear evidence of a mismatch in motivation behind the user ratings.
Whether the massive 16,833 user ratings are driven by bots or just a product of an overly activated audience segment isn't clear, however, what is interesting is that The Rings of Power has 13,148 more user ratings than House of the Dragon, yet a 39 percent score with 16,833 would mean 10,168 user ratings are negative, meaning at least 2,979 of the additional 13,148 user ratings submitted were positive. This is likely a product of attempts to reverse the impact of the perceived review bombing, with fans flooding the show with positive reviews to counteract the flood of negative reviews from detractors (which, ironically, makes the score's accuracy more muddled). Alternately, if the flood of additional user ratings is bot-driven, then such a flood of fake reviews might include a low percentage of fake positive reviews to mask the massive influx, but it's entirely possible the reviews are all genuinely user submitted and simply represent activated audience segments with grievances against the show (in this case, the loudest detractors are generally complaining about race and gender representation).
Amazon has put a temporary freeze on reviews on their own site due to an alleged review bombing impacting their own user review section, so it may not be possible to get an accurate idea of how the show has been received by audiences other than its impressive viewership numbers, which, ironically, are typically correlated with a positive audience rating, meaning the show's performance can legitimately speak for itself despite the flood of negative user ratings bringing down the Rotten Tomatoes audience score.
Regardless, both The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon are off to impressive starts, both in terms of viewership and Rotten Tomatoes review scores. With the majority of the first season of each show yet to play out, the Rotten Tomatoes scores can still swing fairly wildly in either direction as additional episodes arrive.
