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When you have stupid amounts of money you can do stupid things.

Amazon threw down 250 million for the rights to Tolkien stories. I've read several articles and the most astonishing thing to me is: it looks like the actual books, the Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales, are not included. This show is supposed to be a multi-season prequel to the Lord of the Rings.

I guess Bezos can waste the money. I think a series based on aspects of the Silmarillion (Hurin, Turin, Beren etc) could be great, though you would need quality writing to transition it to the screen. But a whole new story just somewhere in Middle Earth? Good luck, fools.

P.S. Bezos please don't raise the price of Prime to pay for this boondoggle, thx.
P.P.S. Hobbit trilogy was awful, a real travesty.

Yeah I was confused by that also. The whole point of adapting any book into a movie is that you've got good source material to work from, no? Maybe they thought the Silmarillion wasn't "mainstream" enough, even though there are characters like Elrond and Galadriel which carry over. The one good thing about it being a "new" story is that they won't have to create filler like they did with The Hobbit. I don't know if that was just studio interference insisting they have a trilogy or what, but yeah, it was pretty bad.

Redocbew wrote:

Yeah I was confused by that also. The whole point of adapting any book into a movie is that you've got good source material to work from, no? Maybe they thought the Silmarillion wasn't "mainstream" enough, even though there are characters like Elrond and Galadriel which carry over. The one good thing about it being a "new" story is that they won't have to create filler like they did with The Hobbit. I don't know if that was just studio interference insisting they have a trilogy or what, but yeah, it was pretty bad.

I thought it was Peter Jackson. He was given carte blanche by New Line after the success of the LOTR. And a lot of the filler was from Tolkien's other works (not completely fabricated)

Wait, a licensed LotR show not based on the books? Jeez, fanfiction has gone really mainstream.

cynan wrote:

I thought it was Peter Jackson. He was given carte blanche by New Line after the success of the LOTR. And a lot of the filler was from Tolkien's other works (not completely fabricated)

Whatever the cause, it was not done well. Not enough material for 3 movies, or probably even 2.

Hawkwing74 wrote:

cynan wrote:

I thought it was Peter Jackson. He was given carte blanche by New Line after the success of the LOTR. And a lot of the filler was from Tolkien's other works (not completely fabricated)

Whatever the cause, it was not done well. Not enough material for 3 movies, or probably even 2.

Usual curse of giving a talented director too much latitude to pursue his "vision" after his magnum opus has already been published.

I left Five Armies convinced the title should have been Battle of the Five Render Farms. A friend disagreed; she preferred Orcs On Ice.

Hawkwing74 wrote:

cynan wrote:

I thought it was Peter Jackson. He was given carte blanche by New Line after the success of the LOTR. And a lot of the filler was from Tolkien's other works (not completely fabricated)

Whatever the cause, it was not done well. Not enough material for 3 movies, or probably even 2.

Yeah, I definitely agree. Three was definitely too many, two would've been alright. Sort of ironic how they take one book and blow it up into three long movies, then in the case of Justice League they try to condense 2, maybe 3 movies worth of material into a 2 hour time slot with predictable results.

ludi wrote:

I left Five Armies convinced the title should have been Battle of the Five Render Farms. A friend disagreed; she preferred Orcs On Ice.

Had similar thoughts about the CGI, but Orcs on Ice just sounds right.

It is strongly rumored that the new series will focus on Aragorn prior to Lord of the Rings.

The content seems even sparser than The Hobbit.

I am not expecting great things from this.

Hawkwing74 wrote:

It is strongly rumored that the new series will focus on Aragorn prior to Lord of the Rings.

The content seems even sparser than The Hobbit.

I am not expecting great things from this.

Another 1-season bomb. $250 mil worth of toilet paper.

Kougar wrote:

Hawkwing74 wrote:

cynan wrote:

I thought it was Peter Jackson. He was given carte blanche by New Line after the success of the LOTR. And a lot of the filler was from Tolkien's other works (not completely fabricated)

Whatever the cause, it was not done well. Not enough material for 3 movies, or probably even 2.

Yeah, I definitely agree. Three was definitely too many, two would've been alright. Sort of ironic how they take one book and blow it up into three long movies, then in the case of Justice League they try to condense 2, maybe 3 movies worth of material into a 2 hour time slot with predictable results.

ludi wrote:

I left Five Armies convinced the title should have been Battle of the Five Render Farms. A friend disagreed; she preferred Orcs On Ice.

Had similar thoughts about the CGI, but Orcs on Ice just sounds right.

For a rather interesting dive into all that went wrong with The Hobbit movies, check out Lindsay Ellis's two part (actually three part) autopsy:
The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy (Part 1/2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs
The Hobbit: Battle of Five Studios (Part 2/2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPJr_tKkO4
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (Part 3/2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7t_g5QObs

You may even come away feeling a mite sorry for ol' Jackson, contractually forced to **** his way through the subjugation of a nation's labour laws.