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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

#581

Post by bergenty »

acchow wrote: post #437
softwaredoug wrote: post #328

I think people are burned out by prestige TV The market is flooded and there’s only so many complicated series people can keep track of at one time. It’s like trying to read a dozen book series at the same time. Years ago with shows like game of thrones, the market was more sustainable. A single show could justify a high budget and dominate cultural discussions for a while. Now the market is so streaming forward and…

> I think people are burned out by prestige TV Can you give some examples? I'm re-watching Westworld from the beginning now because I find most of what's out there to be boring

Westworld was good for exactly one season. I stopped watching halfway through the first episode of the second because they decided they needed to take a regular woman character and turn her into a “boss”.

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

#583

Post by bergenty »

mabbo wrote: post #62

I suspect this will go down beside the Fire Phone. Amazon just sometimes gets this idea that if they spend enough money they're sure to win. I just wish the government would finally break them up so that AWS could keep it's profits and stop funding the rest of the unprofitable divisions.

No thank you, I don’t want the government breaking up big companies because they are the only ones with enough of a bankroll for moonshots. Unless they’re literal monopolies of course.

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

#584

Post by bergenty »

Miner49er wrote: post #120
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #33

For all that money wasted on politically correct elves and dwarven maidens, they could have filmed 10 seasons of "The Expanse", "Firefly", or some other new show.

Being black is now called "politically correct"? Why not just say black?

It’s not just about race, all the women are masculine. Where is the beauty, where is femininity.

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

#586

Post by chaostheory »

tptacek wrote: post #572
chaostheory wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story was butchered. In his defense it makes sense from the box office perspective. The masses need excitement and spectacle. The original Hobbit story doesn’t have that. It’s more low key.

I felt (maybe without justification) that LOTR shoplifted a lot from the Bakshi LOTR. Which makes what happened with The Hobbit even weirder, because people already managed to adapt it reasonably well for the screen; you wouldn't think "much worse than Rankin-Bass Hobbit" was a likely outcome for the money spent.

It makes more sense when you see the box office numbers which is around $3 billion world wide for all three movies. Ideally, The Hobbit is a single streaming feature movie, but Hollywood rightfully saw an opportunity for another “LOTR”.

I don’t remember where I read it, but the Tolkien clan was not a fan of either movie trilogy.

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

#587

Post by red369 »

philsnow wrote: post #484
thaumasiotes wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tom Bomb[a]dil, he was a strange character even for Tolkien's universe and was rumored to be a demi-god. The theory is usually that he's one of the major gods, not a demigod. I feel like there was a Maia who mated with an elf, but I don't remember with any certainty. Demigods aren't a major feature of the world. EDIT: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Melian is the Maia who mated with an elf. Their daughter, Luthien, is…

> The theory is usually that he's one of the major gods, not a demigod It's probably too blatant for Tolkien to have cone up with but Tom Bombadil has the same number of letters in first/second names as Eru Iluvatar. The ring has absolutely zero effect on him, but that would probably be true of any of the Valar just as much as Eru himself.

I think the theory that Tom Bombadil is Eru is fun, but in letter 181, Tolkien said: “There is no ’embodiment’ of the Creator anywhere in this story or mythology.”

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

#588

Post by oblio »

wodenokoto wrote: post #267
oblio wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you're saying is: we're in agreement :-)

And to the original topic, a good LotR series would be closer to "timeless".

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

#589

Post by t0bia_s »

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…

"this seems like a corporate driven project rather than a creator driven project"

This. It is made for profit, not for content. Disney ruined Star Wars, Netflix ruined The Witcher, now Amazon goes for LOTR... Dark ages of cinema.

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

#590

Post by freilanzer »

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.

It's also sus if the only thing that gets changed is the skin colour for no apparent reason, other than to appease twitter. Like I said, the setting is important.

The world was designed in this way for a reason, by the author. It's the same thing the other way around: changing every character from black or 'asian' to white, if the story is otherwise unaffected, would be ridiculous.

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