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Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

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Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#201

Post by cousin_it »

sumtechguy wrote: post #82
d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #44

Tangential — I wish they or someone else serializes Dune. It’s so tailor made for a tv series. Also looking forward to Three Body Problem from nflx

The thing with dune is the first 2 books are perfect for that sort of thing. Then it goes kind of meta weird. Not sure most audiences would be up for that. The last movie I was pumped for. However, I did not realize you could make dune that mind blowing boring. It was very nicely done, but kind of boring. I think that is because the book breaks one of the rules of movies/tv 'show dont tell'. Whereas the dune books ar…

> Whereas the dune books are nothing but 'tell'.

I still feel like the books could be "shown" quite effectively. For example, think of the first scene in the book: a child sees his mother bring in a mysterious old woman, who then puts the child through a brutal test. In the book, the psychology of that situation is sold through lots of dialogue and internal monologue, but on screen you can make it come across with barely any words at all, by acting and cinematography and music and so on. Similar for other scenes in the book, it has so much cool imagery.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#202

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #32

Cool. And if the series flop it will trigger some major review to modern movie/tv making

Maybe, but I’m skeptical. The TV/Streaming space seems flush with cash and several high budget series have flopped or otherwise significantly underperformed without an industry wide reflection or reaction.

I suspect it is because these streaming service owners are desperate to build big content libraries rather than produce high quality shows.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#203

Post by Sebb767 »

ipaddr wrote: post #165
Sebb767 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is subjective, of course. But for me, the ending of GoT just cast a shadow over the other seasons. It's a bit less thrilling to watch them now, since I know it will lead to an inevitable jumping of the shark, but I still like them as-is. The ending of HIMYM, on the other hand, completely ruined the series for me. I honestly have a harder time enjoying them, knowing the actual ending. That's why I think the endin…

What made the ending bad in that series? To actually see the women wasn't terrible.. Seinfeld had a bad ending but it doesn't ruin the show.

-- Spoilers below --

There were a lot of things I disliked. The first thing was the marriage of Barney and Robin, which was built up over the last one to two seasons and then undone within 15 minutes (and without good reason!). Overall, the Barney plot of going from married to divorced back to successful playboy to failing playboy to suddenly caring father was really bad (also, he failed as a playboy, but he also had a 30 day perfect streak?). The next bad thing was the dissolution of the friend group. Of course, life happens, but seeing them just not having time anymore was sad and it makes the build-up of the friendship in the older seasons just seem pointless.

The worst thing, however, was bringing the mother in and then killing her off with basically no screen time. I mean, the whole series was about meeting her! The earlier seasons spend so much time just teasing points where they randomly met or saw each other! And then we get a scene meeting her and one of her dying and she's gone. And what really killed the series for me were the last 15 minutes. I was pretty sad seeing everything that was built up over 9 seasons killed within not even two episodes and then it ends with "just kidding, the whole point of this story was just to date Robin after all". Knowing this just ruins the whole point, especially since the last few seasons do their best to clearly exclude Robin as dating option, even going as far as to have her marry Barney.

-- End of spoilers --

I know they did it this way because the ending was pre-filmed around season 2 and I actually agree with some fans on that this ending is, when read as a summary, not that bad. It's just that they build up so much in these seasons and especially went in a completely different direction in the last one, just to make a 180 degree turn and end the series with a bad joke. That's what completely ruined it for me.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#204

Post by ceejayoz »

tomp wrote: post #193
workingon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never thought I’d live to see the day where people would unironically call equity dogma. But here we are. What a sad state of affairs.

Equity is a deeply evil ideology. The only way to achieve equality of outcome is to repress the out-performers. Promoters of this dogma of course deny that, but the result is inevitably always the same. [0] [0] Vancouver School Board cuts honours programs https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-sc...

They didn't really cut it, they renamed it. AP classes, independent study, and dedicated schools for high-performing students, rather than just individual classes in the main schools.

https://vansd.org/highly-capable-services/

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#205

Post by [deleted] »

djbebs wrote: post #59

So much money for something that I can already tell will flop... I really don't understand why they put people who have no connection with the IP in charge of this. It's really quite sad to see such a beloved world getting an adaptation that is destroyed by poor writing and design by committee

[deleted]

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#206

Post by ceejayoz »

glanzwulf wrote: post #66

Considering there's not a single relevant main stream actor, director or writer on the team. I don't understand where they're spending the money on. Can't wait to see it, but my expectations cannot go lower

> Considering there's not a single relevant main stream actor, director or writer on the team. I don't understand where they're spending the money on.

Honestly, I'd rather money spent on props, effects, etc. than brand-name actors. Look at Stranger Things; virtually no one famous in it.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#207

Post by OrvalWintermute »

hbosch wrote: post #177
prepend wrote: post #18

Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t any…

>Also, I don’t recognize the actors at all. Like not a single one. Compared to LOTR, they didn’t rely on stars but they had Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Viggo Mortenson, Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett. It seems strange to not have anyone. I thought this was a cost cutting effort, but that doesn’t make sense if $465M. Well, lets start off by admitting to ourselves that guys like Elijah…

> Well, lets start off by admitting to ourselves that guys like Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in particular (heck, probably even Viggo Mortensen, at least in the USA) didn't really have strong resumes before Fellowship. As a kid, I don't think I could have told you who Orlando Bloom was before LOTR -- because he wasn't anybody.

I agree with what you said largely, but not Viggo Mortensen

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001557/

Viggo was in a number of shows that would have American audiences familiar with his acting skills far before 2001.

Most notably in my case https://youtu.be/Beogqr20uII?t=147

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#208

Post by tlear »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #129
bmj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christopher Tolkein was hopelessly grumpy (or protective, depending on your perspective) about anyone doing anything with his father's works. Personally, as a fan of Tolkein's works, I thought LoTR was fine . I didn't necessarily agree with all of Jackon's decisions, but, in the end, I enjoyed watching the movies (and still do). The Hobbit films are a different beast, for sure.

Christopher Tolkien I think was fairly correct in his analysis of the LoTR films, and I think it became clear with the Hobbit what the ultimate conclusion of that style of treatment of the source material would be. What he got wrong is that they're perfectly fun and good films in their own right - it'd be more accurate to say they're heavily inspired by the LoTR books rather than being direct adaptions. In some cases…

Denethor and Faramir treatment hurt..

My number 1 gripe was the army of the dead being the deus ex machina making rest of the battle pointless joke. This is after making perfect entrance for Rohan

I like the movies and enjoy watching them, some parts are masterpieces but some not so much.

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#209

Post by moonchrome »

imwillofficial wrote: post #84
moonchrome wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s. Why ? The only old TV shows I see being popular long term is era defining shows you watch for nostalgia (eg. Seinfeld, Friends). Maybe some real classics like Sopranos that everyone was watching at the time. Shows like Mad Men ? I really don't see it. And more importantly this LOTR show - how many people are…

Seinfeld Is not just watch r for nostalgia, its still in syndication, and also has a massive overseas fan base. Mad Men is timeless in its lessons, novel in its execution, and holds a unique place in TV history. It’ll be watched for decades.

> It’ll be watched for decades.

By a few people - likely. But enough to justify investing half a billion into show production ?

Re: Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series

#210

Post by verve_rat »

hbosch wrote: post #177
prepend wrote: post #18

Obviously, I’ll wait and see once it comes out. But it seems odd to spend so much and not have a single established creator that has put out great content. And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign. Looking at the imdb page this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project with lots of different directors that haven’t don’t any…

>Also, I don’t recognize the actors at all. Like not a single one. Compared to LOTR, they didn’t rely on stars but they had Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Viggo Mortenson, Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett. It seems strange to not have anyone. I thought this was a cost cutting effort, but that doesn’t make sense if $465M. Well, lets start off by admitting to ourselves that guys like Elijah…

>Taking chances on creative endeavors is one of the great things people do for others in this world.

I totally agree... but $465 million? That's one hell of a chance.

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