It looks like the second season of The Lord of the Rings spin-off prequel series, The Rings of Power, will be able to finish production with one caveat:

The second season of The Rings of Power is currently in production, so its scripts are likely set in stone, but with only 19 days left of shooting, it's been made known that the showrunners won't be present for the final few weeks. Variety reported this and sources said that J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, executive producers and showrunners, won't be present due to the rules of the WGA writer's strike.

But as they say — the show must go on, and the non-writing executive producers/directors will now oversee the rest of the production as the strike continues. It's a shame that the writer's strike has had to happen and you're beginning to see the ripple effects go from late-night shows, to SNL, to awards shows.

The Rings of Power premiered its first season on September 1, 2022, and has been a hit for Prime Video. It's the first live-action Lord of the Rings series and cost around $700 million to produce for just the first season. After shooting the first season in New Zealand like the feature films, the second season moved over to the United Kingdom for production and has been up and running since October 2022 — a month after the series premiered on Prime Video. The series takes place thousands of years before the events of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — laying the groundwork for the stories that we've known for years.

The Rings of Power Season 2 is scheduled to be released in 2024.