Honestly? I think they will add a lot of non Tolkien elements into the show-the meteor thing, and probably other generic crap. Amazon may have signed an agreement that they would not trash the lore-but who exactly is going to stop them from doing so? Does the Tolkien estate have any right to put their hands up and say "show cancelled, you broke your word"-if not, then there is no such safeguard.
I'm sure that agreement was written in ink, right? I doubt they just pinky-sweared it. So the Tolkien estate could easily sue Amazon for breach of contract and have a pretty ironclad case if they made explicit stipulations. It's not like they don't have the money to pursue it either. A judge could impose a hefty fine and, more importantly, order Amazon to knock off the funny business, which means canning or reshooting the entire show. A gargantuan waste of time and money in either case, which is probably why they've wisely avoided transgression.
They need the audience to recognize he's a villain and they assume making him handsome and beautiful would confuse normies.
Minor correction. Don't get me wrong, the average viewer is dumb, just not as dumb as corporations think they are, otherwise we wouldn't have had all these miscalculated wokefest products bombing so often.
Studios are run by neurotics who unleash a deluge of terrified piss the second they think they might lose money because of some misstep, so they're pathologically risk-averse by nature. They're so committed to playing it safe that they often develop tunnel vision and it all comes back to bite them in the ass.
For decades they've resisted attempts to shoot movies in non-English languages, because they assumed American audiences were too lazy and stupid to read subtitles. Then noted friend of Israel Mel Gibson comes around and releases two films back-to-back which weren't just entirely shot in foreign languages, but ancient, borderline extinct ones and they were massively succesful. Similarly, they've always shied away from having amoral scumbag protagonists I tv shows. Anti-hero was the furthest they liked to go. Then you got a string of hits with The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, etc. It took them a while to get on board but now they've overshot in the other direction and these days you struggle to find a TV show or movie where the leads aren't some brooding grimdark psychopath with a seriously screwed-up moral compass but we're still supposed to like them. They still don't get that good writing is what makes a product good, instead they prefer to check off boxes of things they think are popular and shoe horn them in, so now every protagonist has to do some retarded edgy shit, regardless of how incongruous it is with their character or the overal tone.
Honestly, you can take a look at the production of any great TV show or movie and you're almost guaranteed to find examples of studios trying to force through notes that would've made them stink, and the strong creative drive behind the success of the end product putting their foot down and telling them to fuck off. There's absolutely no chance of that happening here, this shit has been completely corporatized from the inception and the suits have made sure to maintain complete control and snuff out the slightest flicker of dissent.
Every single creative decision we've seen thus far feels like the laziest and most uninspired box-ticking imaginable. It's a crowning example of how not to approach an adaptation like this.
