Lord of the Rings TV Series in Development - How could this POSSIBLY go wrong...

skykiii said:
My sad expectation is that we will get people trying hard to defend/justify this show. I mean I even know people who defend the Brian Herbert/KJA Dune novels, so there is little hope (except that Tolkien fans tend to be smarter than Dune fans, since Dune is kind of in this weird place of being both brilliant and dumb at the same time).

This is kind of a hijack, but you know what I don't understand at all?

People who highly rate the Peter Jackson movies.... but then for some reason rag on the earlier Ralph Bakshi film, or the Rankin-Bass ones.

I mean, they are far from perfect, but their transgressions feel like budget issues and stuff outside their control rather than deliberate attempts to usurp Tolkien (which is definitely the case with the Jackson films' worst excesses). Best of all, I can actually watch those and enjoy them. Above everything else, I find Jackson's films just boring and sleep-inducing.

No, actually the best part is that, for all their mistakes, the animated films actually feel like they've got the right idea, like they're on the same wavelength as Tolkien. Which makes sense.... by the late 1990s, film was basically incapable of ever understanding someone like Tolkien, whereas the 1970s wasn't far removed (and would probably have had a lot of people who experienced his work during the first wave).

Also, its just strange people complain about things like "Viking Boromir" but are totally fine with "there's an hour-long subplot where we fake Aragorn being dead, which is basically a filler arc in an already too-long movie."
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my issues with the old animated ones are
the Bakshi one looks like shit about a third of the time with random jank live action footage with filters and it just randomly stops
the R/B Return Of The King is barely even The Sam And Frodo Show much less the rest of the book

Jacksons have their own issues but other than Topcraft Hobbit the animated ones aren't perfect by any means.

also fun story about Brian Herbert
one time around Sandworms Of Dune or so I caught an interview he did where he was telling The Legend Of Finding Dad's Floppy Discs wherein the remaining notes of Dune were contained
it was basically exactly that bit from South Park with Darth Chef
"my mother's spirit led me to the discs"
"ah, you mean, like, her memory drove you onward"
"no I mean her spirit led me to the discs"
 
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This is from back in 2017 but it seems to be emblematic of how far this series seems to have fallen.
Amazon’s megadeal for The Lord of the Rings is believed to be for five seasons — plus a potential spinoff — with insiders putting the price tag for global rights at around $250 million. Once production budgets, casting, writers, producers and visual effects are factored in, the total for the Rings series — which will be set in Middle-earth and explore storylines preceding The Fellowship of the Ring — could hit $1 billion. Yes, $1 billion for a TV show.
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The budget as far as we see right now is just half a billion. And what was once 5 seasons planned is now a single one. Though that seems to have been just a rumor. I'm certain that amazon was/is planning for this hugely expensive deal to produce a massive franchise and tons of money and traffic to Amazon Prime. It cannot be understated how much of a disaster this has been shaping up to be for the last half a decade.
The thing is, it is hard to see if something is a success via streaming services since new can't see the view counts so Amazon could say that this is a success without much evidence. I'm betting this will get a few awards for its animation and set design and stuff because of its absurd budget so that will probably be a metric too. I am curious if this will actually lead to a significant jump in subscriptions to Prime or not, which is the only real way of knowing how much of a success it is. And, to be honest, Amazon is way too big for this to hurt them in any significant way.
It would be funny seeing a sequel/spinoff to this "ambitious and successful" series having a much smaller budget due to them realizing they have to milk this IP for what its worth but don't want to waste as much money on it.

The question is, who's going to bite the bullet and actually watch this?
 
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KEKMUHLORD said:
Wow, I sure love having a franchises and IP's in the hands of people who actively hate the franchises and IP's. Fuck the Tolkien Estate, Amazon, writers, producers and directors of this heaping pile of shit. What a way to shit on Tolkien's memory and legacy.
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Given the silmarillion references already present(that dumb Redditors are soyjacking about) I suspect the estate has either altered the will or is just ignoring it and we will get trashy butcherings of the silmarillion in a few years.

The actual mythological core of the silmarillion is completely beyond the Reddit tard and Amazon executive alike.
 
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Shamash said:
Given the silmarillion references already present(that dumb Redditors are soyjacking about) I suspect the estate has either altered the will or is just ignoring it and we will get trashy butcherings of the silmarillion in a few years.

The actual mythological core of the silmarillion is completely beyond the Reddit tard and Amazon executive alike.
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Are they really breaking it? The Two Trees and the War of Wrath are both referenced in the LoTR.
 
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Shamash said:
Yes.
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That could be a lot of things. Honestly I think it could just an attempt at a cool visual to get audiences to make buzz, which seems to be what this trailer is trying to do. We'll see if your theory is correct with future teasers, I'm sure.
 
PenguinSuitAlice said:
That could be a lot of things. Honestly I think it could just an attempt at a cool visual to get audiences to make buzz, which seems to be what this trailer is trying to do. We'll see if your theory is correct with future teasers, I'm sure.
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Casual audiences don’t know the trees, so I think the reasoning is Amazon is throwing a few lore references as bones for the actual fans, because it generates hype.
 
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PenguinSuitAlice said:
The overwhelming majority of general audiences subscribed to Amazon Prime aren't consoomers, I'd hope.
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Most of them are normies who just enjoy something, share a few memes, and then move on to the next product without getting involved that much. That's their problem, that they aren't consoomers because consooming also involves investing a lot of money in buying merch. LotR, or at least the original fans of Tolkien, aren't consoomers, they're just normal fans because LotR ain't the type of franchise to release consooming shit beyond a few toys and funkos. And the books, of course. You really can't make LotR a lifestyle in the way Disney wants to be.

That's why they've moved to pandering to minorities. I've mentioned this in another thread (or this one?): all that talk about "black representation" is simply smart people realising that blacks spend a lot of money buying shit that isn't what they sell: shoes, music, clothes, hair. I'm sure there are black Tolkien fans, but Tolkien isn't a "black thing" per se. By selling LotR as a "woke" franchise, they know they can captivate some blacks who are into woke stuff and all white liberals who think they're actually helping blacks by watching this show and somehow expect that hoodrats also feel that they will by whatever they sell in solidarity. Not happening, but it's what they think it could happen.

Shamash said:
I'll make it very simple-blacks where they don't belong=woke.
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I'd say the woke part isn't in the placing of blacks in media where they don't belong, but rather the specific intention of doing it as a retribution for not being featured in media before.
 
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IDanceonTrannyGraves said:

Rumor: The Lord Of The Rings Scholar Tom Shippey Fired For Telling Prime Video They Were “Polluting The Lore”​

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That's interesting. I remember Nerdrotic bringing up a similar rumor a year (or two?) ago and later received a call from someone representing him or the Tolkien estate saying that he didn't leave the production. Looks like Nerdrotic was right.
 
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IDanceonTrannyGraves said:

Rumor: The Lord Of The Rings Scholar Tom Shippey Fired For Telling Prime Video They Were “Polluting The Lore”​

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This is some next level gaslighting of the communist kind I would say.

"Everyone agrees with us!"
"Aw, I dont..."
"*BLAM* Everyone agrees with us...right?"
"Ah, yes, yes we do! Hehe...*scared gulp*"
 
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PenguinSuitAlice said:
This is from back in 2017 but it seems to be emblematic of how far this series seems to have fallen.

The budget as far as we see right now is just half a billion. And what was once 5 seasons planned is now a single one. Though that seems to have been just a rumor. I'm certain that amazon was/is planning for this hugely expensive deal to produce a massive franchise and tons of money and traffic to Amazon Prime. It cannot be understated how much of a disaster this has been shaping up to be for the last half a decade.
The thing is, it is hard to see if something is a success via streaming services since new can't see the view counts so Amazon could say that this is a success without much evidence. I'm betting this will get a few awards for its animation and set design and stuff because of its absurd budget so that will probably be a metric too. I am curious if this will actually lead to a significant jump in subscriptions to Prime or not, which is the only real way of knowing how much of a success it is. And, to be honest, Amazon is way too big for this to hurt them in any significant way.
It would be funny seeing a sequel/spinoff to this "ambitious and successful" series having a much smaller budget due to them realizing they have to milk this IP for what its worth but don't want to waste as much money on it.

The question is, who's going to bite the bullet and actually watch this?
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I remmber reading about a Lord of the Rings series in the works for like 5 years. So I was actually surprised it came forward.
 
The Reddit thread is just more pleading on behalf of the show. I think they(meaning Amazon and its PR toadies) probably realize they have no way of winning over the Tolkien fandom, and so are just going to go out in terms of Jackson film nostalgia alongside wokeside girlboss crap.

They aren't even leaning into "racist Tolkien fans hate this, and they are totally in the minority, black elves and numenorians are great!" hostile marketing strategy. They have invested their billions and they're just gonna let things fall where they may at this point.
 
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