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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

#261

Post by hef19898 »

zpeti wrote: post #258
treis wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How about the repeated obsession with female characters who can easily beat up men? The thing you complain about is in the source material. Remember? "No man can kill me", "I am no man", stab stab stab. >But watching these women beat up men is laughable tbh. Maybe ask some famle survivors of domestic violence how they feel about this. How is that any different than tiny weak Hobbits killing giant spiders and otherwi…

Storytelling, that's how. Which doesn't exist. What you'll notice is that in better storytelling, there will be an explanation of why the hobbit can beat the giant spider. Outsmarting it, being invisible with a ring, whatever. Good storytelling means you make the impossible seem possible. Now, all we have is token women who we all know are there because they are women, beating up men in ridiculously impossible ways,…

We see a ton of bad story telling, agreed. How women are protrayed is not among the reasons.

Disclaimer: I have been handled pretty easily by women in BJJ and kickboxing / boxing drspite being 20 kg heavier and a head taller. And I am not un-trained. Get over it, competent and strong women do exist.

Edit (because I have to get of my chest): The latest Dr. Strange is propably the best example of bad story telling I've seen in a long time. I quit the MCU after Black Widow (I like the character and Scarlett Johansson) and swore to maybe watch the next Thor, max. Until I saw Dr. Strange was already free on Disney+, and I needed some distraction. All that bad film did was making me not watch any MCU film ever again...

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

#262

Post by stjohnswarts »

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.

Seinfeld was very episodic and you could watch just about any episode and get some humor out of it (not as much as if you never missed an episode of course)

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

#263

Post by SilverBirch »

Given the change in market dynamics around video streaming, I think there are going to be a decent number of projects like this, that no matter how good they are, stand no chance of being positive ROI anymore (if they ever were). I think a really interesting angle on this is what does Amazon do in the few years after the series comes out. They've sunk so much money into the rights for this, and it is a valuable property, but it's going to be impossible to spend similar budgets on anything new. I wonder if we're going to see a massively expensive season 1 and then simply nothing because they don't want to do a season 2 with 1/5th of the budget.

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

#264

Post by rsynnott »

ceejayoz wrote: post #245
freilanzer wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I write a (non-human, not that that matters anyway) race and describe them as being of "ivory skin" vs "ebony skin" then it matters. If it's just regular people then it doesn't. It depends on the setting.

It matters if it's a key plot point. If it's got no impact on the plot, there's no harm in changing it a little. Plenty of other things described in the books get tweaked for TV/film; it's a little sus if only skin color changes get you upset. If you did a find/replace on LOTR for "ivory" with "ebony", zero elements of the story would be impacted.

Well, the oliphaunts might be a bit happier, unless that was The Hobbit (I haven't read these for about 20 years).

But yeah, it'd be pretty weird if a TV adaptation _was_ word-for-word the same as the book, honestly. That's virtually never done, and rarely ends well when it is.

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

#265

Post by wodenokoto »

svantana wrote: post #57
anshumankmr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. 465 million seems still steep for 8 episodes TV show. I am all for it cause Disney has seemingly skimped on their CG budget for their newer shows. So more competition means more TV shows will have film quality production. But it is a concern, if their show costs more than something like Avengers: Endgame which had some of the biggest actors in Hollywood involved in addition to the probably insane VFX bu…

Presumably some amount of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting is at play. Since New Zealand is footing a fixed percentage of the budget, it would only make sense to artificially inflate the costs.

Please don’t use links as words. Links get abbreviated on hacker news.

So “some amount of Wikipedia” doesn’t get any message across.

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

#266

Post by rsynnott »

Akronymus wrote: post #140
AlexandrB wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how it's fine for there to be dragons and magic in fantasy. But minorities ? That's a bridge too far.

Tolkien wrote from a perspective of what he experienced. That being early to mid 1900s england. Which simply didn't have many nonwhite people. Also, I think most aren't actually opposed to minorities being in the show, but rather the hamfisted way they think theyll be included with. (I personally expect racism being a big part of the show that will need to be fought.)

> That being early to mid 1900s england.

Not that I think this is _particularly_ relevant (as mentioned elsewhere, most of the characters aren't even _human_, and it's not like he generally specified "but if they _were_ humans, the Ringwraiths would definitely be white"), but LoTR was finished in 1949. There were lots of non-white people in the UK in 1949; if you've heard of the Windrush scandal, the people impacted by that arrived the year before, and it's not like they were the first non-white people in the UK...

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

#267

Post by wodenokoto »

oblio wrote: post #184
treis wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seinfeld is the exception. Heres the top TV shows of 1993: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-rated_United_States_tele... Seinfeld is the only one that people still watch.

All those shows are contemporary to the 90's. Seinfeld just has generic situational humor + great characters, and even Seinfeld will probably fade as its nostalgic watchers age and go away. It will just take 30-40 more years :-)

There’s a lot of landline / phone booth / message machine based jokes and story lines.

I don’t think 20 year olds will have an easy time picking up the show as they can’t relate to those problems.

I think Seinfeld is very much riding the nostalgia train now.

Mad men don’t assume any of its audience knew what the 60’s was like, so it has a chance of being more timeless.

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

#269

Post by youngtaff »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #49
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…

Speculatively, is there some tax optimization purpose? Eg, if you invest in content that builds technology that could be used for other purposes? Amazon is pretty amazing at tax optimization. But R&D tax writeoffs are pretty great, so not sure what it would accomplish. hmm, so maybe this is just cover for the UFO skunkworks.

It’s shocking how much Amazon are getting from the NZ government

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

#270

Post by NikolaNovak »

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…

Agree with you in principle; but FWIW I knew Elijah Wood (if nothing else, from Deep Impact:), and couple of supporting established actors on periphery were a huge draw and added massive credibility - Ian & Kate delivered amazing performances to KEY characters; Liv Tyler's voice was legendary; and Agent Smith was there too! :D
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