Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 anything remarkable and seem to have just done other Amazon shows.

Of course there are video projects done by unknowns that turn out great (Jackson had done Heavenly Creatures and Frighteners and a few others before LOTR), but I was kind of hoping there’d be some creative team who is really into Tolkien who tells great stories.

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.

I worry that this is Amazon saying “cost is no limit” to a project team instead of artists and creators.

While I'm not particularly looking forward to this series, having rather unknown actors isn't putting me off at all.

And why shouldn't they go with directors they are happy with? TV series often have a lot of different directors, often directing just a single episode of a season or even a series.

TV series are often bad though. You can often see drastic dips in episode quality. Do they really know what they’re doing with these directors?

The budget-talent-ratio just seems off. Usually, movies spend a lot of money on hiring talent, which here clearly isn't the case here. So the question is where is that money going. Grandparent and I are afraid that we end with something graphically completely overproduced and no story.

Also, if you provide a junior engineer with a few million, you can't expect perfect software, even with that budget. Same reservations apply here.

In Hollywood you don’t always hire people for talent but branding and audience awareness.

If you have a brand like the Hobbit you don’t need brand name actors or directors to attract an audience.

You're missing the point: We (GP and I) don't think you need known actors. There are great series with (then) unknown actors. It's just strange to have such a massive budget (which usually would go, in part, to known actors and directors) and then forgo them.

Also, for directors, there's definitely a case to be made that you need someone who can handle such a large budget. That's why I made the example with the junior engineer.

Yes, some of the best titles have none or just 1 top tier actor at the time: Star Wars (Alec Guinness), West World (Anthony Hopkins), Game of Thrones (Sean Bean), Breaking Bad, The Wire. I'm sure there's other's I can't remember.

Some directors prefer fresh actors for some movies. It s not necessarily a red flag, but it could be. Time will tell.

But none of those had a budget this out of wack, that is the point being made here.

Not a great list for that premise. The Amazon Lord series not only lacks stars, it lacks famous mid-tiers as well.

West World had Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, among others. These are mid tier actors that are quite well known (even though they're not superstars).

Breaking Bad had as its lead a very prominent television actor in Cranston. Malcolm in the Middle was a hit tv show that had a long run as far as TV shows go. He was already very TV-famous prior to Breaking Bad. Getting Cranston to carry Breaking Bad was them going with a TV heavy-weight with tons of experience and a deep familiarity for TV audiences.

I forgot about Ed Harris, I think he's way higher than mid-tier; he's very good and has been around forever. West World was probably a bad example thinking about it.

>a very prominent television actor in Cranston

He wasn't very prominent (he certainly is now). The show was for a particular demographic (later GenX) but that's about it. I'd say it was on par with That 70's Show. He was in a few Seinfeld episodes too. Compare that with the cast of LoTR and it's a stark difference.

Point being, some directors prefer fresh faced actors for certain projects and it's worked out well. I'm sure with the supply and demand, there are a lot of good actors that haven't gotten much screen time.

And in Star Trek and B5!

But Malcom in the Middle was in syndication (151 episodes), so plenty of people knew his face if not his name, because reruns were airing 2x a day in virtually every US television market, and this was back before streaming so syndication was a huge way to get audience awareness. . The That 70s Show comparison is apt, and while he wasn’t Ashton level of famous from the show, he and the actress that played his wife (Jane Kaczmarek) were both better known than the actors who played the parents on That 70s Show.

Cranston was also the perfect person to cast for Breaking Bad because his character was so different from who audiences expected him to be. It worked brilliantly, the juxtaposition between the kind of zany (if put-upon and long suffering) dad then playing a dramatic role of a high school teacher turned drug-lord.

Having a cast of mostly lesser-knowns and unknowns is one thing. Having zero even recognizable names for a production that costs half a billion dollars is something else.

And Bryan Cranston was a recognizable, if not super famous, name. That’s part of why Breaking Bad worked, it subverted expectations and brought in some character actors that were at least visually familiar to audiences.

Same with the LOTR films. Liv Tyler was actually really huge at the time, having been in a series of high-profile blockbusters and also famous as a pop-culture figure thanks to her dad her music video appearances. Cate Blanchett was already famous, having been nominated for Oscars and BAFTAs. Sir Ian McKellan had been knighted for 20 years and also had nominations and awards out the ass. Sean Astin and Elijah Wood were successful child actors trying to bridge to adult roles. No one was too big of a name to cost too much or detract too much from the story, but you had enough recognizable names to get people excited about the trailer.

The Marvel films followed a similar thing. RDJ, obviously extremely famous already but Iron Man was his ultimate comeback role. ScarJo was also already a huge name (which Marvel used to their advantage for the next decade plus, b/c she was A-list and at the top of her career), and they balanced that with lesser-known names that became big stars.

I don’t think anyone is saying you need a star-studded cast. If anything, that works against you for properties like this, because people have already seen the characters in their mind or in other adaptations. But you usually need one or two recognizable faces, at least with a budget of this size. A smaller-budget show can have a cast of unknowns that hopefully then blow up into superstars, but we’re talking about a budget that eclipses even the largest film properties, where you’re not paying a lot of it towards the above the line expenses.

I think Amazon execs think the power of the LOTR brand can overcome anything else, and maybe they are right. But I don’t know if I would risk $500m of a production with zero recognizable names in front of or behind the camera. Even Stranger Things had Winona Ryder, after all.

Breaking Bad didn't work because the character was different. There was significant push back from AMC about casting Cranston.

Vince Gilligan went to bat for him because he was certain Cranston could carry the dramatic load after working with him on an episode of the X-Files.

In Star Wars, Peter Cushing was also a top tier actor, but his character (Grand Moff Tarkin) was admittedly a rather small role. And James Earl Jones was also rather well known, but maybe doesn't count because he was just voice acting for Vader (who was physically played by the body builder David Prowse).

Why strange? Others have pointed out plenty of benefits that going with good but lesser known actors brings, so why take on more risk with more famous actors? They don't need them for their brand value in this case.

Amazon would probably like to have the next Orlando Bloom, but doesn't need or want the current Orlando Bloom (or any other famous actor).

Let me formulate it like this: The most expensive series so far was The Pacific, with a budget of $22 million per episode [0]. You'd expect a high budget series to spend a lot on actors and directors - let's just go with 50%. This would put this series on a budget equivalent of $800 million to $1 billion with a "normal" cast (depending on how much you calculate as budget for lesser known actors). Given 20 episodes [1], this comes down to an equivalent of $40-50 million per episode. Even extremely high production value series like GoT were well below this number. Just going with the actual number of $23.25 million per episode already makes this one of the most expensive series of all time.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be bad, but having a lesser experienced cast burn through that much money smells like bad management and could therefore be an indicator that the series is highly over-produced with not much content to go with it. Of course, time will tell, but the lack of known-good talent in the management and the insane amount of money spent don't make me overly optimistic.

[0] https://stacker.com/stories/3159/25-most-expensive-tv-series...

[1] https://www.slashfilm.com/568297/lord-of-the-rings-season-1-...

The Pacific was definitely not expensive because of its cast (none of the leads, Sledge, Leckie, or Basilone, were well-known). You can just watch the show and see where the money went.

Oh sorry. CGI is why, it isn’t strange if you watch the credits and see armies of animators at multiple studios.

In terms of established brands, I worry about the Dune Mini Series repeat. It was... fine. Felt scene by scene from the book, faithful, and unimaginative. I can't even remember if I watched it to end or not, let alone any additional detail.

The Hobbit movies were some of the worst films ever made, which doesn't help your point.

From an IT perspective, we know that the money is going to management and marketing department. And maybe a new pool for HHRR.

theres a difference between hriing talent and hiring a name.

many big actors are fabulous but theres a vast pool of actors to draw from who are equally fabulous but dont cost an obscene amount because their name isnt known.

As a person who watches a lot of content it is nice to see some fresh faces and voices. that year where Benedict Cumberbatch played everything from a dragon in The Hobbit to Sherlock Holmes and even Khan in Star Trek sucked.

I think that them going with directors they are happy with is precisely the problem. Amazon has cranked out a lot of mediocre tv shows that don’t have any significant greatness. What’s strange about these directors is that they haven’t directed anything I thought was good at all.

The writers have uncredited writing credits on Flash Gordon and Star Trek Beyond [0]. I like those but it’s just strange that that’s all they have. Like that’s it. Not even a complete screenplay.

I’d love to read the story of how they assembled this team that is free of PR.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm4260438&job_type=wri...

>"They are happy with is precisely the problem. Amazon has cranked out a lot of mediocre tv shows that don’t have any significant greatness."

This - the fact that this is an Amazon production already tells us a great deal about what to expect.

I have a low expectations for TV, but the Amazon catalogue has really plumbed new depths. It is an artistic wasteland. Just reading the title of this thread I therefore thought, 'How is this going to work out?' If you add to that the concerns of the OP, it does not look good.

OP was simply pointing out that by the looks of it, the new series will not be helmed by any Auteur. Peter Jackson was a modern auteur and people's expectations for LotR have been set by his distinct style.

It is easier to have unknown actors/actress to sign up for longer contract I believe.

Such high-profile show is unlikely to use super expensive and well known actors/actress for big roles, due to budget and commitment issue.

As a huge ASOIAF fan, I had the same concerns after Game of Thrones was announced and first details were shared. The crucial difference, though, is that GRRM himself was involved in the series.

And we all know how it ended once they ran out of his material. Yes, I'm still salty.

I never even bothered with Season 8.

And you'll be happier if you keep it that way :-) The only worse ending I know is that of How I Met Your Mother. Just skip the last two episodes there, seriously.

The last season of Game of Thrones is genuinely the worst possible ending to the show and genuinely takes the top spot for the most disappointing ending of all time. At least,HIMYM had its defenders but I've never seen a good thing spoken about the story in the final season.

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 ending of HIMYM is worse.

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.

>What made the ending bad in that series?

For me, the ending seemed very scripted, very boilerplate, very forced, very unimaginative. It seemed like the writers were in the contract longer than they wanted too and they were just "phoning it in."

-- 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.

>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!).

First half of S5 and all of S8 and S9 depict in detail why Robin and Barney are horrible together.

>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!

Nope. The kids themselves tell their father otherwise. Ted tells the story of "how I met your mother" to his kids to justify to himself why he should move on with his life and again pursue a relationship with Robin; his kids tell him that they have no problem with this, and are happy that he is interested in "Aunt Robin", who has already been a substitute mother figure for them (see "Little Boys").

>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".

Rewatch the show. Not just "Little Boys"; every single episode, from the first one onward (which I saw the day it aired, in September 2005), contains clues that lead the patient and observant viewer toward the ending.

Apparently 19 year-old Redditors are not the only ones who believe in TV-style 'shipping "true love", which means that the girl the guy fate says is meant for him in S1E01—in this case, the Mother—must be still The One in S9E22; any variance must be punished. They haven't yet learned that in the real world heartbreak and heartache and sad things do happen, and sometimes it's possible for two lonely old friends to find love again later in life.

To put another way: Most people are lucky to meet the love of their life.

Ted is luckier. He meets two loves of his life.

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)

It's amazing how they managed to go from beloved franchise to salted earth in one season. People used to rewatch the seasons, but not so much now that they know where it's all headed.

If you look at discussions, you'll see that the actual decline started earlier, by some opinions as far as the end of season 4. The problem is that back then, it was not as clear that the series was declining - it could've been a super interesting new story thread or a new intrigue starting out. But now, with the knowledge that it leads nowhere, you can clearly see the problems starting out.

Also, of course, it's less fun watching the stuff now, knowing that it will slowly fade out into a bad ending.

That's true, though I suppose if they had stuck the landing the relative decline after the end of season four (which I agree with) would have been forgiven.

I felt like I was being gaslit during seasons 6 and 7. It was already pretty damn bad by that point, but all my friends kept telling me I was just being negative and that it was still an amazing show.

I hated being right about that one.

Yeah, it could have been a franchise for the ages, even maybe another Star Wars... maybe.

But that last season killed all that dead. Hell, there might have a way to rescue it until the last couple of episodes.

It was truly remarkable to watch potentially billions of dollars of future value evaporate in real time.

There are plenty of shows that had no idea how to get out of what they started (looking at you, Battlestar Galactica). However, no show will ever fail to end more spectacularly than Lost.

"Lost" is also a strong contender there. Yes, I am still disappointed about that.

Have we forgotten about Lost?

I hated the ending of HIMYM at first, but now I'm good with it.

Part of my change in heart comes from rewatching the series, it seems to me that they had this as the intended ending all along. I also think it serves as an interesting commentary on the notion of love and romantic attachments that Ted struggles with throughout the show.

But overall I am frustrated with the film industry's overall obsession with subverting expectations. Viewers want some sort of payoff, and withholding that can really burn people who've invested time into watching content (especially for long running TV shows). You can sometimes achieve payoff even while subverting expectations, but too often you end up with an incoherent mess.

They obviously planned that ending in some way, since it was filmed before. Still, especially the last season definitely did not seem to intend this ending at all. In fact, it seemed to me like Ted finally accepted the fact that it's not going to be this ending.

That being said, I do think they could've made this work. If you read a summary, it doesn't sound that bad. The thing that really ruined it for me was the forced delivery within two episodes. It just felt like tearing down everything, with no consistent plot or delivery and then topping it off with a bad joke. If they scrapped the actual season 9 and instead made a season 9 and 10 leading there, it would've been totally fine. And they knew this was coming!

Also, on the subverting expectations part: This is totally fine. However, HIMYM is a comedy show. Playing it for a joke is fine, but that was more the "suprise, your mom has cancer!" type of subversion and definitely didn't fit the mood show.

>Part of my change in heart comes from rewatching the series, it seems to me that they had this as the intended ending all along.

Correct. Almost every single episode of the show from the first one in September 2005 in some way foreshadows the ending. It's, overall, the most coherent and consistent continuity in television history.

(For those who don't want to rewatch the show, I've heard that watching the first two episodes and the last two episodes together makes for a very satisfactory rom-com.)

people who say only season 8 was bad are part of the problem, book readers were warning about important changes as early as season 3 and 4, GRRM left after 4 due to those changes because while not obvious at first, they would result in entire character arcs getting wrecked long term.

The show started going "Hollywood" in season 5 and it was obviously declining in quality but people defended it and got what they deserved with season 8

I'm happy that there were people who think like me in this regard. I personally was very bothered by season 4/5 and didn't have much hope afterwards but everybody kept hyping the series to cloud nine; it made me very self conscious haha

I pretty much agree. I watched through Season 7, but I think the thrill was gone, after 5.

I'm still pissed about what they did to the Dorne plot.

A friend of friends was a massive GoT fan. Massive fan, could not wait to see more.

Before the last season was done, he had a heart attack and passed away. People were saying for months after that how lucky he was.

That is sad.

My father passed the year before 9/11. I sometimes think he was lucky to have not had to deal with that (or the aftermath).

It was even before then. Season 6 was absolutely terrible and the storylines made no sense from that point on.

Is it possible the reason it ended so badly is the same reason they ran out of material?

It's been 11 years since the last ASOIAF novel. I think GRRM may have written himself into a corner and is unsure how to tie up all the threads and satisfactorily end the series.

[Spoilers Below]

I think you are spot on about ASOIAF, but I don't think this is the reason GoT ended badly. Books and TV Show started diverting much earlier, and the show had substantially fewer storylines, which is a good thing in this context I think. I also suspect that the ending we got is based on notes GRRM left. Daenerys turning evil is heavily foreshadowed, Bran ending up on the throne kinda makes sense, and so does Jamie not cashing in his redemption after all. WW not being the final arc mirrors LotR, and GRRM has repeatedly stated that he loved that way of storytelling. The first book is called Game of Thrones, the ending is about that as well.

The problem in my opinion was just terrible execution: It was all really rushed and with terrible dialogue, so none of the story elements were developed in detail, and felt artificial and wooden.

[Continuing spoilers]

On Twitter late last year, I saw what was probably the single best idea that would have greatly improved the last few episodes, and could probably have been accomplished with a single scene (and maybe still could for a future "definitive edition").

The idea is that at some point prior to the last two episodes, Danerys receives word that Mereen has fallen, and that the slavers have retaken it. Her greatest achievement in "breaking the wheel" is now gone, and her designs to be the next Aegon are no longer nearly as assured.

Building on this idea, the scene could play out with her completely losing it and threatening to burn Mereen to the ground, her advisors only barely talking her out of flying across the Narrow Sea right then and there.

Mereen's destruction is averted, but the seed has been planted in the viewer's mind: Danerys has much less to lose now, and she's willing to rain fire on a populace with enough provocation. Now when the other shoe drops and she does this on King's Landing, the turn has enough narrative foundation to feel plausible and earned.

I quite like this idea.

I really wish the show had another few seasons to get into the lore and tie up the azure ahai/lion of the night to the white walker narrative (if there are in fact connections as seem to be implied). I just find myself not understanding the motives of the white walkers. Why now? Who summoned them to rise up? The show never really answered what it set up in its first scene with those body parts the nights watchman found. I don't know who laid them there. I don't know why they are laid like that. I don't know why they are laid here and not elsewhere. I don't know what laying them there even does magically, if anything. It was a great scene imo, but without being properly addressed it just feels like provocative lore bait.

If you look at the original pitch GRRM gave for ASOIAF, many of the plot points never happened (like Jamie murdering everyone ahead of him, blaming Tyrion, and taking the throne for himself).

You say that the problem is the execution. I think it goes deeper. It's impossible to execute. GRRM knew this about many plot points and that's why he changed his mind about many things by the time he had to expand on those specific plot points.

> Bran ending up on the throne kinda makes sense

If he ever gets to the end, I'm certain he'll see that this doesn't make any sense.

Or at least he won't write the same bullshit the show gave us: "he deserves the throne because he has the best story". I still want to throw the TV at the wall when I think about that.

Feels more like he has bitten off more than he could chew. He aimed to be today's Tolkien, but somewhere midway he run out of steam and decided there are other fun things to do. Can't really blame him - he doesn't owe anybody to dedicate his life to his book, even a popular one - but it's kinda clear by now that we shouldn't get our hopes up to have any proper conclusion to the story.

> It's been 11 years since the last ASOIAF novel. I think GRRM may have written himself into a corner and is unsure how to tie up all the threads and satisfactorily end the series.

A much simpler explanation is that GOT show creators/owners paid him off not to publish the newer books, until they consider the market life of the TV show exhausted.

Unless GRRM is struggling with mental health issues, it doesn't take 11 years to finish a book. Heck, it's his series anyway. If he has trouble wrapping up all his plotlines, he can always write an 8th book to extend the story.

Nah, that sounds too conspiratorial. Martin by now should have enough money to basically not have to think of money ever again in his life, especially given his relatively modest lifestyle. It's not mental health issues, it's just he seems not to be very interested in finishing them up anymore. Writing 8th book is not gonna help if he has trouble mustering his creative juices to finish the sixth.

That makes absolutely no sense. Why would they want him to not write books and give them a story.

Even if GRRM wrote at the fastest pace he had ever written, the books would still be way behind the show.

Here are the GoT Season release years by season: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019.

Basically, 1 season a year, with the final season taking 2 years.

Here are the ASOIAF book release dates: 1996, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2011

So it was 2 years at its best (the first 3 books), and then it increased to 5, and then 6. He had already been slowing up badly as he tied himself up in knots, that he has been trying, unsuccessfully, to untangle for some time.

> It's been 11 years since the last ASOIAF novel.

To put this in context: All 9 books of The Expanse were written during this period along with a six season TV show based on the same material. The two writers were involved in both actively.

I've 100% given up on ever seeing how ASOIAF ends. Same with Rothfuss's Kingkiller, it's been 11 years and I stopped caring during the previous decade

Sure, but Expanse also ended on a weak season.

But not on a bad one, which is more than you can say of GoT. Also, The Expanse has now "ended" the second time, so there's still hope.

I presume that The Expanse will return in a decade or so, which would help in depicting the last three books.

Pffft. Amateur.

David Gerrold is never going to finish the "War Against the Chtorr" series. The last book was 1993. We're about to hit 4 decades since the last book.

This is exactly what happened.

GRRM wrote himself into a corner he hasn't been able to disentangle.

And the showrunners didn't have the luxury of waiting 11 years between seasons.

I do think they could still have done a better job, but it's hard to say from the outside because we don't know the budget, time and story constraints they were working under.

By the time the final few seasons came around, almost all the actors had become famous on their own right, who were taking on a ton of other shows (and I doubt they were under contract for the entire run, especially since it was never expected to last as long as it did) and it must have been a massive challenge bringing them together to film the final few seasons.

I do think GRRM is struggling to tease the rest of the story out, but I don't think that was the problem at all with GOT. The key plot points were all basically fine. It just all felt so rushed and totally unconvincing. Daenerys going mad and Bran ending up on the throne are reasonable enough directions to take the plot, but the show completely failed to develop either of those things, so when they did happen it just felt forced and not believable.

They also did a bunch of other annoying/bad things that deviated from the early seasons (bringing along a bunch of nameless characters on adventures to just to kill them, wardrobe and makeup went in a frankly absurd direction for no obvious reason, emphasis shifted to "wow" moments in episodes instead of paced out plot, just dropped a bunch of story lines that were interesting, etc).

I’m salty too. As soon as season 6 was released you could tell it was pure fly by your pants nonsense that had no integrity and catered to the lowest denominator.

Sean Bean wasn't an unknown. He wasn't a star either, but he was the villain in one of better Bond movies and also was in the first Lord of the Rings.

Perhaps a gimmick — known name, killed off. Buzz!

No perhaps.

Ned being killed off early is a key part of the "no one is safe in the game of thrones!" motif. Having a known actor and playing against type (nice guy when usually villain) just underscores the surprise.

There is a similar story about Gene Wilder in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He first appears with a limp and then somersaults to show he's fine. The whole point of that scene is to have the audience think "I can never trust anything this guy says again".

> Having a known actor and playing against type (nice guy when usually villain) just underscores the surprise.

Normally you'd be right, except Sean Bean always dies.

You’re right, he was killed off early in Equilibrium too!

Which makes Sharpe so much more impressive, he saved Sean Bean over multiple episodes / movies!

Also the voice actor for the emperor's son in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I'd say he was pretty well known and a bit of a star given that he was sought out for such roles and used in marketing, although not obscenely famous.

He was in the Sharpe movies as well

D&D had written a lot of movies (25th hour, troy, kite runner, wolverine, brothers) and there were some “known actors” (Lena heady, Peter Dinklage, aiden gillan, Charles dance, Sean bean).

And I think the biggest problem with game of thrones is that the show runners crapped out after GRRM ran out of material. So I would want a better runner for Tolkien.

I just hope they have the overall story arc figured before filming, something Babylon 5 nailed down to a t back the day even if I think DS9 aged better for re-watching purposes. If they did not, or even worse stop following a consistent inner-world logic and rules (or not establishing one in the first place), the LotR series might just end as GoT or TWD... Which would really be a damn pity

And Benioff and Weiss, for whatever criticisms people want to throw at them for the final season, were experienced writing/producing partners who had successfully adapted material before. Benioff is the one who pursued adapting ASOIAF with GRRM (and convinced GRRM that he understood the property and also that it was better suited for premium television, not as a feature film), got the HBO deal, and started working on it in 2006, along with GRRM. He wasn’t just installed by the studio to be the showrunner — he was the guy that worked to get the deal done for 5 years before it even debuted.

No one involved in this project appears to have the same level of involvement. Instead of someone like David Benioff bringing a property to the network to adapt and develop, Amazon spent out the ass in a bidding war over the rights and then hired people to run the show.

That can obviously work just fine, but in general, it works better when the showrunners and producers are the ones that pursued the material and sold it to the network (or steamer, in this case).

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.

> But R&D tax writeoffs are pretty great

Great like salary tax writeoffs and rent tax writeoffs. (And even if R&D isn’t expensed right away it will still have the same impact on taxes in the end. Now it will be depreciated in five years in the US.)

I don't think it is the case here, but this happened in the UK.

> Tax inspectors were told that A-listers from Hollywood were starring in a £19.6m production that would be shot in the UK. However, the movie was never made and the only footage shot was seven minutes of "completely unusable quality" filmed in a flat, which cost just £5,000.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/01/uk-film-executi...

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

LOTR, and also Peter Jackson are not compatible with modern media. LOTR is completely opposed storytelling wise to the current dogmas of postmodernism and equity, it's fundamentally a story based on old western/european/christian myths, basically what gets called white supremacy these days.

I think this will turn out to be an absolute morbid tv series as it will force LOTR into the current dogmas, but this is probably why no-one is involved who was involved in the films, as those actually respected the original story.

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 means equality of outcome, basically meaning you believe every person is equal in their results.

This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in outcome in society.

If you cannot see this, you are trapped in religious level dogmatic thinking.

(PS: if you want to talk about equality, which we might perhaps call equality of opportunity, I'm all for it. But equity is certainly not that).

A charitable interpretation of what you call modern dogma is that people acknowledge that we're not all the same (that's what diversity is about, I think), but that the differences aren't predicted by gender or race or culture or whatever. That is of course also not very compatible with LotR.

If they're not predicted by gender or race, then why do companies need 50% women? The very fact that that is a goal, means you do not believe these aren't predicted by race or gender, but that they are, and if you don't have 50% employees you are discriminating.

Of course the people in favour also say what you just said, which just shows how completely conflicting their views are.

I guess either not everybody follows my charitable interpretation, or they try to counteract supposed systemic biases by introducing quotas.

Any two groups of people classified by "gender or race or culture or whatever" will have different outcomes. Italians and Irish will have different incomes, representations in corporations, etc. The dogma is to say that all differences can be ascribed to systemic injustice.

> Equity means equality of outcome, basically meaning you believe every person is equal in their results.

> This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in outcome in society.

> If you cannot see this, you are trapped in religious level dogmatic thinking.

Equity is something that societies create, not an assertion about people's innate abilities or a statement of fact about the universe.

For example, we make buildings handicapped accessible rather than simply declaring that all people are able to walk.

> (PS: if you want to talk about equality, which we might perhaps call equality of opportunity, I'm all for it. But equity is certainly not that).

Perhaps it would be illustrative to show that you could actually make the exact same rhetorical sleight of hand about "equality of opportunity":

"Equity of opportunity means you believe every person is equal in their opportunity. This is religious dogma, because it's just not true. We are not the same, and you will always have differences in opportunity in society."

This is clearly silly because "equality of opportunity" is a goal you are aspiring to rather than a statement of fact about current society, but the same applies to "equity."

You could also say the same thing about "justice" or any other concept that's not actually a statement of fact about society.

I'm actually not sure where the idea that "equity" is an assertion that outcomes are equal as a matter of fact comes from. It doesn't seem to be a definition that is used anywhere except when people are trying to make this argument that "equity" is obviously absurd and therefore we should abandon it and focus on "equality of opportunity."

Note that this is completely separate from any argument about to what degree we should attempt to achieve "equity" versus "equality of opportunity"; it is simply an issue with this argument using a dubious definition of "equity" to show that "equity" is obviously absurd being a bad argument.

I believe the difference is

"Everyone will be working highest paid jobs" vs "Everyone can have highest paid jobs (if they put effort)"

You can't make people go for highest paid jobs, but you can definitely let them decide if they're interested in trying to get them.

Too much equity can be a bad thing, but you don't go around saying drinking water is bad b/c too much of it will harm you.

What other word would you describe when people cry over "lack of diversity" when the story is set in a fantasy world that did not have such type of diversity to begin with?

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...

> I personally expect racism being a big part of the show that will need to be fought.

I agree that this would be extremely hamfisted. Especially considering the books already have some metaphors for racism like the strained relationship between elves and dwarves. However, I also think this kind of a thing is just a symptom of bad writing - not some woke conspiracy.

Most of the characters in LoTR weren't even _humans_, were they? It's hard to see what issue people would have with minority actors playing an elf or whatever.

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.

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.

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

"It must be to appease Twitter, can't possibly be because the actor had a good audition" seems pretty racist. If Amazon was afraid of Twitter, they'd be pro-union.

> It's the same thing the other way around: changing every character from black or 'asian' to white

That's not the same thing, though. The new LOTR series hasn't changed every character to Black or Asian. Nowhere near it.

John LeCarre explicitly describes George Smiley as short, overweight, and balding. None of these apply to Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman in their respective portrayals of the character. This doesn’t make their portrayals any less arresting.

Oh, please... no one is complaining about having minorities. The point is retconning a different type of "diversity" into a story just for the purpose of marketing for the current consumer base and its cultural sensitivities.

Taking a cultural landmark and just repackaging it (new version with 20% more "minorities"!) where the race of the actors does not change anything for the story being told is just cheap tokenism.

By all means, I'd love to see new stories and new characters, and these stories could benefit greatly from a diverse cast. You can use the diversity then to show how different people value different things, how conflict can come up due to these differences, how conflict can be solved despite these differences, and so on... let's just not pretend that this crap that Hollywood wants to shove down our throats is any good just because it ticks the right woke checkboxes.

There is a long history in theatre of casting people in roles who aren’t the same as the character. Notably men would often be cast in female roles. Maybe, just maybe, if seeing a brown elf ruins a show for you the problem isn’t with the show.

"Fun" fact: men would play women because acting was considered a very low class activity, and women that acted were seen as prostitutes.

Anyway, you just missed the point and I am not in the mood of arguing with someone who can't understand nuance in thought. Have a good day.

Yeah, the guy who can enjoy a show with a brown person playing an elf is the one who can’t understand nuance in thought.

Precisely. The same guy who thinks that parroting their self-righteousness is a virtue. The same guy who can not understand the difference between diversity and tokenism. That's the guy who can not understand nuance in thought.

Your cognitive disconnect is ridiculous. Pointing out that you finding that a show is worse because they cast brown people as elves is not a fault of the show has nothing to do with my self-righteousness, though you're happy to spread your own self-righteousness throughout this thread while talking about how butthurt you are that they'd dare destroy your favorite show by casting brown people in a traditional white role. I care little about e-cred. You also aren't the guy that gets to decide what the difference between diversity and tokenism is.

> Pointing out that you finding that a show is worse because they cast brown people as elves

Go ahead and tell me where I am saying anything about my personal opinion about this particular show. (Hint, I didn't!) Also, please tell me why you chose to ignore everything I wrote in the third paragraph of the top comment.

You are passing a value judgement over what you think you read instead of what was actually written, and you continue to try to push that as an argument.

> where the race of the actors does not change anything for the story being told

So what's the problem with casting someone of a different race then? There are plenty of talented non-white actors in Hollywood that get passed over for roles because the "canonical" race of so many classic characters is "white". I agree that the motivation at the corporate level is sometimes to check a "diversity" check box - but for the actors this means getting work and getting paid as opposed to not.

The issue is not with the casting.

The issue is with the lack of new stories and the idea that just putting some color on "stories where the classic characters is white" is enough.

Diversity is something to be cherished. But if all we do is to, e.g, take Mozart pieces and give to conductors of different races and backgrounds, are we really promoting diversity or are we just putting a corporate spin in institutionalized racism, and implicitly perpetuating the idea that "classical" (or better, "erudite") music can only be valued if it comes from dead white people?

I haven't been watching much TV or movies lately, and one of the main reasons is that it seems that most of things come out are just re-heated servings of old stuff. The one exception that I can think of is Atlanta, which deserves praise exactly because it is more focused in telling a story and taking risks than in merely following a certain formula to please the audiences.

So, to repeat: the story of LoTR has been told already. It has its context and its place. To get diversity now, I rather see these talented people telling new stories, with their own voices and their own perspectives, not just put on some kind of display by the studios and used to manufacture fake virtue.

Oh please... a subthread which the GP started by retconning Tolkien as "what passes for white supremacy these days" to argue it was being ruined by casting (with digressions into Marxism spoiling beauty) now itself gets retconned as "nobody complaining about having minorities"

Every film makes hundreds of decisions to appeal to different sections of movie audiences and live up to expectations of modern movies from casting unusually attractive people to typecasting English accents in a non-English world to cutting half the original scenes in a book and shoehorning an implied love interest in there, yet somehow all this pandering to consumers' cultural sensitivities that actually change established storylines get less hostility than the decision to cast a black woman in a fantasy series whose entirely new [for licensing and lack of material reasons] plot lines aren't even known yet. If people consider Tolkien's world not having segregated casting to being "crap Hollywood wants to shove down our throats", it's hard to believe they're doing so more out of concern diverse issues aren't being represented properly and less out of hostility to the idea that white people might not always be the default.

the irony is of course that whilst being far from woke, Tolkien thought white supremacist ethnography utterly risible, included a Legolas/Gimli subplot as heavy-handed as any Hollywood antiracism parable, wasn't especially bothered about describing skin tones or appearance, and to the extent he did, made it clear that Middle Earth as a precursor to the modern world included darker skinned people.

I hear this argument quite a bit and think it’s shallow. Of course, I’m not against diversity in casting, but am against bad arguments.

Stories have internal consistency. So while Tolkien has dragons and magic, they all make sense together. If a character pulls out an iPhone it doesn’t fit and detracts from the stories.

Saying “but iPhones? That’s a bridge too far, how can you believe in dragons but not iPhones.” The story isn’t random and it’s not everything.

Tolkien goes into genealogy of characters so switching the skin color requires lots of other changes to maintain that sense of reality. If a character now has purple skin instead of green skin, then that might mean something.

I think this also applies to any story and it’s not so much about changing characters demographics and more about bad storytelling that detracts from the reality of the story.

> Tolkien goes into genealogy of characters so switching the skin color requires lots of other changes to maintain that sense of reality.

But Tolkien didn’t specify what traits inherit in which races did he? How do you know how skin tone inherits in this magical world?

Even in our universe we have species such as Chimpanzees which grow darker skinned as they age? How do you know the same doesn’t happen with wizards? In our natural world color is indeed quite dynamic. Even human skin tones, hair colors, etc. are quite dynamic in our world (even among related individuals). In a magical world there is nothing preventing the different races from being even more dynamic and diverse.

Indeed. There are elves that live for thousands years and have magic powers. There are some humans who have a normal lifespan and others, like Aragorn, that live for hundreds of years. Elves and humans can somehow cross-breed. Why should we assume that Middle Earth genetics work anything like normal Earth genetics? It's so weird to insist on keeping this one aspect of human genetics when everything else seems to be up for grabs.

Why should we assume that Middle Earth genetics work anything like normal Earth genetics?

Note that Middle-earth Earth ('Arda') supposedly is normal Earth: LotR takes place during the Third Age, whereas we're currently in the Sixth or Seventh Age.

Even if you assume that genetics works the same way in Middle-earth (where you know, magic exists) and today’s earth, why would anyone assume it works the same on the magical species as it does with modern humans?

Modern humans are one of the most homogeneous species we know of (apart from the our crops that we have bred into homogeneity) and even humans show very dynamic inheritance patterns. A red hair can pop up after several generations of different hair colors for example.

There is no reason to assume that genetics in different (often magical) species is less dynamic then in modern humans. If anything we should have more variety and more dynamic traits as different races are interbreeding then today. If only for the reason that more diversity opens more possibilities for more creative and fun stories.

There are plenty of minorities in Middle Earth.

The Rohanim, for instance.

Or, in the racist euphemism way you've chosen to use it, the Haradrim.

What prevents you from casting minorities b/c it is fantasy? What crazy logic is that?

This usage of equity is, what, five years old? Does something that new really call for an “I never thought I’d live to see the day”?

I think that OP is not objecting to the usage of "equity" but its association with "dogma".

It’s a good sign that something is dogma when emotions run very high over exact word choices.

For example there were huge controversies in the fourth century over homoousion (“same in essence”) vs homoiousios (“similar essence”).

Reminds me of equity vs equality.

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/

bad example, but there are tons of others

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...

"The draft rejected the idea of naturally gifted children, recommended against shifting certain students into accelerated courses in middle school"

You should read that article a bit more.

> The model has been in place since 2014, yielding a few years of data on retention and diversity that has been picked over by experts on both sides of the de-tracking debate. And while the data is complicated by numerous variables — a pandemic now among them — those who support San Francisco’s model say it has led to more students, and a more diverse set of students, taking advanced courses, without bringing down high achievers.

> California’s recommendations aim to expand the options for high-level math, so that students could take courses in, say, data science or statistics without losing their edge on college applications. (The move requires buy-in from colleges; in recent years, the University of California system has de-emphasized the importance of calculus credits.)

You’re just really confused about what equity is. It’s not “equality of outcome.” The whole point of seeking equity is to free the out-performers from the chains holding them down.

Edit to add:

Seeking equity is about surfacing relevant merit, and fighting irrelevant demerits. For example if someone has the skill to be a great engineer they should not be given the job of taking notes in meetings just because they are a woman. Gender is irrelevant to engineering. But many people who aren’t male find their engineering career progression slowed because of their gender. That is not an equitable outcome.

But obviously it’s impossible to create an equal outcome: you can’t magically make everyone on Earth a great engineer.

Can you define what “equity” is then, according to your understanding?

To me, “freeing the outperformers” sounds like “meritocracy” which I wholeheartedly support!

See my edit. Equity means your outcome is determined by relevant metrics, and not by irrelevant metrics.

You’ve described meritocracy.

Equity is pretty explicitly anti-meritocratic. E.g. a woman should be hired over a man, or a black should be accepted to university instead of an Asian, not because they’re more skilled or have greater potential, but to address historical grievances and/or ensure proportional percentage-wise representation.

Meritocracy only works when everyone starts on an even footing. What we are attempting to do is equity of circumstances so meritocracy can truly take hold.

Meritocracy is about determining who has ruling power. The hint is in the suffix -cracy, like in democracy or autocracy.

Equity has much lower stakes. It’s about the ability (opportunity) for each person to live the best life they can, free from oppression. It’s not necessary to rule over other people to do that.

Equity and meritocracy share similar challenges in that a social order already exists, and therefore the determination of merit is currently being determined by specific people. So it’s not objective.

Equity is a goal that is very hard to reach. What you’re complaining about are some admittedly blunt tactics to try to get there. But they’re not in themselves the goal.

Even if you don’t like those tactics, it’s a bad look to say that the goal of equity is “deeply evil.” It’s like saying “everyone getting a fair chance is deeply evil.”

Edit to add: an example of a relatively uncontroversial tactic to improve equity is accessibility engineering for websites. Being visually impaired doesn’t stop a person from thinking, so we have made social rules that websites should be constructed in a certain way so that visually impaired people can interact with them.

Well, you can also do meritocracy in organisations/companies (e.g. GitHub used to do that), and by extension, most of education system (which is preparing people for careers).

Which isn't what's happening lately. Asians and whites are discriminated in university admissions in preference to latinos/blacks. Men are discriminated against when hiring and doling out scholarships to the benefit of women. Openly racist policies are being proposed ("reparations") or even legislated [0] in the name of "anti-racism". Non-extreme-left viewpoints are being suppressed. People are being cancelled for making jokes, or for supporting biology (e.g. biological sex).

This isn't happening in the name of "meritocracy", or in the name of "equality". It's happening in the name of "equity". It's bullying, it's repression, it's discrimination, it's evil. You might mean good (hell, even Hitler just wanted to improve the world!), but if your way to justice requires massive injustice along the way, well, I hate to break it to you, you're just evil.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/oregon-cares-fund-laws...

No, there’s a perfectly valid course to help the under-performers perform as well as they can and help the out performers reach new heights. Equity doesn’t have to be perfect, the closer we can approach the ideal the better.

What’s deeply evil is your opinion purporting your straw man is the only way forward to blatantly push your agenda.

I think it's because "equity" is a code word used by people who think equality is bad.

although i wouldn’t have worded it the same way, there’s definitely something true in your comment. I’m still amazed that people keep torturing stories made at different eras with different mentalities to try and promote today’s philosophy instead of coming with original materials. If you want diversity and black people on screen, why not create stories about the amazing empires that ruled the african continent in the past, rather than rewrite parts of LOTR ?

> amazing empires that ruled the african continent in the past

because then you'd have to confront that african empires had slaves too

I think that would be an interesting story. And I think, with time, we’ll get more of these stories.

Because that would require all these studios to actually create new things and take risks. And that's not what these corporations are known for, right?

I have a morbid fear that studios want the “conflict” as it’s 1) news and any news is good news, 2) set up a right vs wrong narrative that puts their tv show on the right side against whatever jerks are being racist/sexist/whatever.

So it seems like a non-creative way to get free promotion, but I think it distracts from storytelling.

The example I remember is how bad the 2016 ghostbusters reboot was. And the studio had this whole narrative about how sexist trolls were maligning the movie and this got repeated with any criticism. It seemed like astroturf that highlighted a small amount of internet sexist complaining and used it to smear any criticism for any reason. That seems like something that would be attractive to a beancounter-type.

very interesting theory... I used to attribute those choices to lazyness and "playing it safe", but your point is a reall possibility. I sincerely hope you're wrong though.

>... instead of coming with original materials.

I personally think they are simply not capable of making something engaging, BECAUSE they feel the need to promote todays philosophy over good storytelling. (They as in the streaming services)

> I’m still amazed that people keep torturing stories made at different eras with different mentalities to try and promote today’s philosophy instead of coming with original materials.

Been happening since forever. Jesus was a dark-skinned Middle-easterner. It's funny that in nearly every story over the world of people who have claimed to seen Jesus in a miracle, he appears as their own race!

There is a difference between making projections of mythical, transcendental figures and outright retconning a character just to support a certain narrative.

We can not prove anything about Christ's appearance and Christian values do not change based on that. So it's only natural that people will represent Him as they are used to see their own people.

It is a whole other game to change the description of a character with a well-established description and a set context.

Because there's not wildly successful books with wildly successful movies about the amazing empires that ruled the African continent.

And it's hardly rewriting parts of LOTR to have a black actor portray Legolas. Everything is still the same except the color of the guys skin. You'll be fine.

Back around 2015, it was that, switching out characters as black. Fine.

2022 it's something much more sinister. It's the entire postmodern philosophy mixed with equity forced into stories. LOTR is about good and evil and the triumph of good. It doesn't dismantle what good or evil is, it doesn't question everything, it's just a great story.

Unfortunately modern writers cannot bring themselves to write stories like this anymore, everything has to be questioned, everything has to be changed, everything sacred has to be unsacred, everything beatiful has to become ugly.

It's hard to put it into words. But it is happening. People in the media industry really have lost all sense of good storytelling.

>Back around 2015, it was that, switching out characters as black. Fine.

That's what the GP is complaining about.

And I don't get why that rates a "Fine". What's wrong with race neutral casting?

> 2022 it's something much more sinister. It's the entire postmodern philosophy mixed with equity forced into stories. LOTR is about good and evil and the triumph of good. It doesn't dismantle what good or evil is, it doesn't question everything, it's just a great story.

You can't look at Tolkein's life and the LOTR and then just call it a great story. You can see the echoes of his personal experience in the work. It's no different than today.

If they had a black Legolas in LotR and Hobbit, sure, why not. Since they didn't, well, having a black Legolas just destroys continuity. But who am I complaining about missing continuity, after all we have the latest Dr. Strange with the sole purpose of including the Fantastic 4 and X Men into the MCU without invalidating the entirety of the MCU so far.

>Since they didn't, well, having a black Legolas just destroys continuity

Again it's just skin color. Little bit dramatic to call that destroying continuity.

Well, any actor not closely resembling Orlando Bloom would be a continuity issue for me. That has nothing to do with skin color, just with not retconning characters physical appearances. Because personally I don't like that. E.g. Heimdall in the MCU should look like Idris Elba in every movie he shows up in.

I didn’t think Legolas was in this new series at all?

"there's not wildly successful books with wildly successful movies about the amazing empires that ruled the African continent"

I guess that's the interesting problem the studios and equality advocates should try to solve. To me, what they're doing right now is close to an insult to the african-american community. It's like saying "there are really no original cultural production coming from your community, nor anything remotely interesting in your past writing about, so we'll have to recycle ours to make some room".

> Everything is still the same except the color of the guys skin.

That's exactly what people mean when they say wokesters use people's cultures as skins, with no content.

If you wanted to add African representation, let's say Zulu, you'd add something specific to Zulu culture: people, language, songs, stories, etc. But instead they just change some skin colours in an existing story.

That's not representation, that's just skin.

I think the counterargument would be that casting people of different races isn't really supposed to be about culture at all. In theory it's meant to provide a sense of inclusion to those who might not look like the characters as they were intentionally written. As in: "LOTR is still for me, even if I don't look like a European."

I don't really want to get into the validity/efficacy of that. I just don't really have an informed opinion. But I do think that's the reasoning.

I think that wanting to have a more diverse cultural backdrop for the stories we tell is something I can definitely get behind, but I don't think it's really that related to having a more racially diverse cast for a story with a decidedly Anglo/Euro origin.

>"LOTR is still for me, even if I don't look like a European."

What? Is there a law that says I can't enjoy art that doesn't include my skin color? If there's a TV series about Nelson Mandela, would you be okay with a white actor playing him? What about Rosa Parks? It's for inclusion right?

The problem is that racially diverse cast while keeping the same euro-centric stories is all they've been doing for the past 15 years, because all they really care about is looking "nice".

If they produced movies with original storylines more regularly, then every minority would naturally find something they could relate to, simply because author would naturally produce contents aligned with their time.

Instead of that, studios give the impression of beeing hostage of the "diversity mob" which demand its payback on every single content. It's just pathetic, and a missed opportunity for truely great and interesting content.

Yes, people want what you describe too.

What I describe means you don't effectively hang a "Whites Only" sign on one of the larger productions happening today.

This parasitic move is intentional and done for several reasons. A brief summary of what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE

Yeah, this is a great explanation.

And it's not just characters they destroy, but beauty, any past tradition whether good or bad. It really is about dismantling everything. (and somehow magically once you dismantle everything some sort of equity based marxism is what we're supposed to have). Why is marxism as a philosophy immune to dismantling? That's the million dollar question...

Aside for the lack of new, original and iconic characters and stories, we are living in a bad period for reboots of our favourite stories to be re-made and re-written by americans.

I only hope it will end soon.

You do know that Lord of the Rings is a fiction right? It happens in a reality where literal magic exits. I mean does the story specify the skin color of every character? Does it say that every elf is white skinned? I mean this is in a magical world, for all we know hobbits skin tone changes with age like that of Chimpanzees, being light when they are young, and darker as they get older. Or maybe non-binary genders are actually quite common among wizards. There is plenty of room for diversity in a fictitious universe. In fact a lack of diversity requires the special reading here, not the other way around.

Then the story is literally about a bunch of races solving a problem by working together. I mean the text it self literally celebrates diversity. Why wouldn’t you depict that in your casting?

Different species, not races.

Sorry, I’m used to use the word race in a fantasy setting and species in a natural setting. A race in a fantasy world is any species a character of that story can belong to.

This gets confusing e.g. in Star Trek where races exist in the fantasy sense and in a cultural sense (e.g. Being black (cultural race) is as much a part of Benjamin Sisko as being a human (biological race) is).

Yes, I agree. I just feel it important here, as the divides are huge, both culturally and especially physicallly, than what we used to think of as 'race' between humans.

In Lord of the Rings, humans, elves, and orcs can all interbreed, so they are all the same species.

Different species can also interbreed in the natural world. E.g. wolves and coyotes regularly produce fertile offspring (most often via dogs since wolves and coyotes mate at different times), grizzle bear and polar bear likewise (will happen more often as polar bears migrate south from the melting ice caps). Even humans interbred in the history of our species with different species of humans (most notably Neanderthals).

I think the both terms are correct, but I like races better because species also includes every lifeform which can never be characters, like ravens, wargs or even tobacco plants.

Just like donkeys and horses then?

Donkeys and horses produce infertile mules. Elves and humans produce fertile offspring. Aragorn has elvish ancestors.

> Donkeys and horses produce infertile mules.

Usually.

In the Dark Sun setting from AD&D, the offspring of humans and dwarves are also infertile. Also called muls, which isn't the most creative move but hey.

I don't recall there being any children of dwarves and men in the Tolkien legendarium, though I've not read it all by any means.

Given how common "interfertile but with sterile offspring" is between related species in nature, it's relatively rare in games and fantasy settings.

> If you want diversity and black people on screen, why not create stories about the amazing empires that ruled the african continent in the past

That'd be a hell of a story. Compare the extent of an actual African empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire

> LOTR is completely opposed storytelling wise to the current dogmas of postmodernism and equity

Amazon literally make (made? not sure is it still going) a TV drama about Nazis. I think they can cope.

In my opinion you could still make a compelling LOTR without the “white supremacy” vibes because there is a clearly defined good and evil and the constituents of those groups can be diverse (as the original is). What’s impossible is to replace every protagonist with a female and expect any of the gravitas to hold up.

As a fan of post-modern movies, I would love if this was the case. However I’m afraid that you are misremembering history a bit here. Postmodern movies heydays have long passed. I’m afraid the reached their peak in the 90s with e.g. the Danish dogma movies (pun intended), independent American movies like Clerks, etc. In fact Pulp fiction was a counter punch to the scene by taking elements of postmodern movies, telling a pulp story and dressing it in a Hollywood film. Ironically it is a long running joke among postmodernists to over-analyze Pulp Fiction with a postmodern reading.

Postmodern films got a tiny resurgence around 2007, but never with the same popularity as the pomo scene of the 90s.

So Lord of the Rings is made between those two modes. The movie industry is living in the wake of the unexpected Titanic success, and the studios are trying to create the next big hit. Movies like Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Cast Away, Meet the Parents, The Mummy, Moulin Rouge! or Chicken Run etc. is what most people are seeing. The themes of the post modern movies is indeed far away.

Why do known actors matter? When I see Chris Pratt in a movie I just think oh it's Andy from parks and rec. I see Forrest Gump but in a different movie or Jim Halbert in a horror movie. Known actors make it hard to be immersed.

Nobody becomes known if they don’t have their first time. I think it is not bad at all.

It's not necessarily bad if you have someone amazing in charge of casting, but it's really hard to build a cast out of people who nobody has heard of who it turns out are actually incredible talents. Known actors are a known quantity in that regard, which is why it's safer to go for them. Normally you'd expect there to be some on a big budget project that isn't taking risks around quality.

For me, it’s not that there are any unknown actors, it’s that every single one is unknown.

I like seeing “fresh” actors because they are unknown. LOTR had many unknown actors and lots who later went on to notoriety (eg, Karl Urban). But they also had some known.

My apprehension isn’t that there are any unknown, but that all are unknown. And I think that’s a bad thing for a $400M project.

Kind of like startups. I’ve met some great people who were working for their first company ever. I’ve also worked with some terrible people who didn’t work out. To get small funding this happens all the time. But to get $465M in funding with a leadership team that’s entirely new is unusual.

I agree that the feeling of immersion is at stake here (I feel this is why it was so off-putting to see Ed Sheeran in GoT scene), but I think this actually depends on the actor. There's so many that lack the talent or the will to mix it up, and consequently just playing themselves in roles. Chris Evans, Megan Fox, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Statham are some examples that come to mind.

Then there's others, like Daniel Day Lewis, Di Caprio, Ralph Fiennes, etc. who's roles comes across as being fiercely distinct and yet still utterly convincing.

This is a total paraphrase and possibly a mis-creditation, but I'm pretty sure Ian McKellen said something along the lines of "When you watch good actors, you think, they're a good actor. When you watch great actors, you actually believe they're a real person."

Christopher Lee is another one, always playing the villain, always playing it good and never just being Christopher Lee.

I think it’s not necessarily bad in it’s own, but no known actors + no known show runner + studio without a track record of success + IP without involvement of its creator and Vague primary sources(ie no specific written narrative to follow) seems like a risky combination.

> (Jackson had done Heavenly Creatures and Frighteners and a few others before LOTR)

No one ever mentions his first, a splatter flick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Taste

Hilariously bad but a fun watch.

Meet the Feebles never seems to come up either.. one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Feebles

I have yet to see it. I grabbed bad taste around 2005/6 via torrent after hearing a sound bite in a death metal song. I found out about Meet the Feebles but couldn't find a working torrent at the time and forgot about it. I'll have to remind myself to find and watch it one day.

I remember the "making of" extra on the Bad Taste DVD being great. Jackson's low-budget special effects are really quite impressive.

I believe this is it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POXwP4ucPe4

> And not to involve Jackson seems off

Personally, the more I reflect on the Jackson series, the less I'm a fan. He borrowed heavily from the pacing, framing, and selectiveness of Bakshi's animated film, which didn't finish the trilogy.

But worse, though inevitable when you have billions of $$ in your eyeballs, Jackson over-printed a lot of kids' imaginations with his depictions. I can't remember what I thought things looked like before I saw his films--and I probably read LOTR for the first time in 1993...

And I'm not just "new stuff bad". But seriously, the source material looked way different in my head--and felt different, too. Especially the Hobbit.

"Consult Jackson". Jackson had his say. He has no authority over new depictions; he didn't write a word of it.

I had read LOTR just before the movies came out and I think Jackson did a pretty good job, although the books have a different feel with all the walking bits and the songs etc.

I agree 100% about The Hobbit though, the movie was pretty decent, but really feels very different to the book. I think this is expected though as they extended a pretty small book to an entire trilogy of films and adapted what is essentially a children's story for a far wider audience.

As lots of people have noted...

"thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread"

I still love the original animated hobbit. The pacing was a mess, but there was something about the creativity in the animated films of the 70’s that we’ve lost I think. Wouldn’t translate to a modern audience, but I love that, i dunno I’ve been calling it “leather bound fantasy” feeling.

To me The Hobbit book was interesting in that it clearly was a link between fairy tales and what we now call the fantasy genre. Even in terms of writing style. It makes sense that that would have to be adjusted for the movie, especially since you'd want continuity in tone with the LOTR movies.

I think Jackson did a fine job. That doesn't mean, however, everybody past him should copy what he did forever or ask him for his permission or opinion. One great production of Hamlet doesn't mean Hamlet has now look like that from now on forever and whoever did it owns the story. One of the things that makes the story great is that there are many angles possible and many creative approaches available. So no Jackson involvement is no problem for me.

I'm not optimistic after they shat the bed on WoT. Turning epic fantasy into visual media content is hard work and they aren't spending the money in the right place. I'll check it out but my expectations are extremely low.

I wouldn't say there's a big name star in there, but I've seen Peter Mullan in quite a few things, Nazanin Boniardi is moderately famous, Lenny Henry is definitely famous in the UK, and Morfydd Clark was tremendous recently in Saint Maud.

As others have said, this doesn't necessarily matter too much.

>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 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.

Secondly, when every major actor working today has either got fully hoovered into the Marvel or DC cinematic universes or is looking to exploit the next franchise with lopsided deals then yeah... I imagine it would make sense going with actors who have less "demand". You think about how Amazon is going to handle this show. The video component streaming on Prime Video, OK, sure. Game studios involvement, perhaps? Alexa skills and audio adventures? Integrated Fire device experiences of some kind? Unknown quantities of almost any digital content possible... it's much, much easier to get this kind of "360 degree" commitment from lesser known actors compared to, say, Timothee Chalamet as Frodo (or whatever).

Also we ought to make sure we give credit to the lesser known actors, producers, directors, writers, stylists, designers and so on that create enthralling and award winning movies and TV shows every year! So let's at least give some of these people the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Taking chances on creative endeavors is one of the great things people do for others in this world.

Well... Sean Astin was Rudy.

Goonies never say die.

> 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

Dude! Crimson Tide, Carlito's Way... I know people like GI Jane.. not my favorite, but I'll give it to him. When was The Road? I think that was after. The Psycho remake... I know it got panned, but he was good in that, Anne Heche wasn't great, but he was really good.

> It stars Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Penelope Ann Miller, Luis Guzman, John Leguizamo, Jorge Porcel, Joseph Siravo, and Viggo Mortensen.

With a stellar cast like that, I am definitely missing a gem!

Putting it to the top of the to-watch list.

>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.

I think I'd disagree with the assertion about Elijah Wood, Deep Impact was a pretty big film and he had a key role in that. He also had many other roles before that in some pretty notable films, especially The Faculty and heck, he was playing alongside Kevin Costner in 1994!

Perhaps I am just old, and a keen film watcher, but I wouldn't describe him as a lesser known actor at that point in his career.

Also, Sean Bean has long been a well known supporting actor. Anna Karenina, Goldeneye, Patriot Games, etc. But I would concede that he's very much more well known in the UK because of his TV roles, especially Sharpe which ran for 7 series. Again, not a lesser known actor if you're playing the bad guy in a Bond film.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this assumption - that the top talent pool largely begins and ends with the best known actors. I'm not debating their obvious talent but I am confident that the industry limits who gets to be well known. One way is by excluding actors who aren't immensely attractive.

> assumption - that the top talent pool largely begins and ends with the best known actors.

I don’t think anyone is making this assumption, and certainly not me.

What I’m saying is that in a show with such a big budget, not a single actor is well known or even decently known. That’s unusual and not a good sign. It’s possible that this show is unique in that it has all great actors and is not paying a ton for them. Certainly it’s possible.

But try to think of another show with even a moderate budget that was awesome with an entire cast of “unknowns.”

There are some movies, Kids comes to mind with a new director, writer, and stars like a then unknown Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevingny. But that budget was like $400k and I think if they had had $40M they would have had different actors.

Babylon 5 managed okay with little known actors and mediocre effects.

For people like Elijah Wood, I would say that before he was working. Deep Impact was hokey, The Faculty was essentially a Class of 84/99 retread.

They're alright, but just that.

He was a notable child actor who was trying to transition into more adult roles. I'd say he was known, but not the first person you'd ever think of.

Lord of the Rings changed that. It made him an "actor". From there, he got a lot more work and he was able to influence what he worked on.

Elijah Wood was famous as a child. That doesn't really translate into adult roles.

I mean, seriously, look at Wil Wheaton or that Home Alone kid.

Often child actors (like Wil, for example) don’t actually want to be actors and it’s just overbearing parents making them do it. Naturally, for many of them, as soon as they reach adulthood and gain more control over their lives, they don’t continue a career in acting.

That's possible (although it is entirely possible Wil is misremembering what he said in elementary school to his mother). But I also think it's hard to make the transition. Who did it successfully?

Even Neil Patrick Harris needed a "big break" as an adult to get back into acting.

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

I’m not saying that that list were major stars. I’m saying they were known with substantial resumes.

I don’t recognize a single person in the RoP list. I watch 100 movies a year. Not a single person.

So my point is that that is weird and there’s no precedent that I know of where a show used complete unknowns for every role and was good.

I think giving unknown actors is a great idea. For some roles, not all.

From what I've read, the show is basically guaranteed to run it's course which is 5 seasons. They probably gave the show runners some degree of long-term investment. They likely spent a ton on set design and character design to setup events that won't air for a few years.

> And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign

Not if The Hobbit is anything to go by.

>And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign.

Didn't the Tolkein group basically disavow Jackson and said never again after fiasco known as The Hobbit? If that's true, then it makes a lot of sense not to involve Jackson in any new project blessed by the Tolkein powers that be.

Harry potter movie changed directors a few times right?

Amazon is getting a 160mil tax credit in NZ.

Regarding the team: "The team who will be creating the “LOTR” TV series includes: executive producers Lindsey Weber (“10 Cloverfield Lane”), Bruce Richmond (“Game of Thrones”), Gene Kelly (“Boardwalk Empire”) and Sharon Tal Yguado; writer/executive producer Gennifer Hutchison (“Breaking Bad”); writer/executive producer Jason Cahill (“The Sopranos”) writer/executive producer Justin Doble (“Stranger Things”); consulting producers Bryan Cogman (“Game of Thrones”) and Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”); producer Ron Ames (“The Aviator”); writer/co-producer Helen Shang (“Hannibal”) and writing consultant Glenise Mullins."

So they have established people in the background and a well known franchise. As for not involving Peter Jackson maybe they just wanted to start fresh, no idea but George Lucas isn't involved of the Mandalorian

I think hiring Bryan Cogman is a red flag.

Why?

Huge LOTR/Tolkien fan ever since I was a kid, loved the Ralph Bakashi animated LOTR film from the 70's(great rotoscoping and creepy mood), absolutely loved the Peter Jackson trilogy, liked the hobbit animated films Rankin and Bass(good music!, weird animation?), even found enjoyment in the newer Hobbit trilogy(3 movies for 1 small book? Smaug was great though!).

After seeing this amazon trailer though I am beyond disappointed in what they are creating and with the budget they have it is really sad. I could be mistaken but I feel like this will be looked at as a gigantic flop for amazon. The story looks like its not even based on anything Tolkien written, which is beyond me given there are so many interesting tales Tolkien wrote that have not seen the screen(Beren and Luthien, the fall of Numenor, the silmarils and Elvish wars of the 1st age).

And like the parent above mentioned it is alarming that the actors are all unheard of and there are no connections to the successful franchises that Peter Jackson created, where is this roughly half a billion going? The CGI looks lackluster so its not there.

> there are so many interesting tales Tolkien wrote that have not seen the screen

Beorn! Completely left out of the Hobbit movies https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Beorn

Beorn was in the 1st Hobbit briefly, but he could have more screen time! I forgot about one character that never saw the light of day in any film(cartoon or movie) Tom Bombodil, he was a strange character even for Tolkien's universe and was rumored to be a demi-god. I would rather see stories about him than what amazon is sending out.

> 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 a normal elf, in much the same way that Elrond is a normal elf while Elros is a normal Numenorean. (Though Luthien doesn't seem to have been given a choice.)

> 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.”

Agreed more about Tom Bombadil would have been the way to go. Can't believe he didn't make the cut. Not sure how they managed to do that.

If this was built as if it was MCU they would have had a small cameo then a full movie on Tom Bombadil.

A Taiki Waikiki directed Tom Bombadil series would be epic

Or a Taiki Waikiki short of Tom Bonbadil would be great.

I’ve been expecting a 15-20 shirt put out that would fit into Fellowship with just Tom Bombadil and Elijah Wood et al. The cast and effects should be minimal so would be a great student project that would probably attract the few actors needed to make it.

No he wasn’t. He’s in 2/3 of them.

I didn't see the Hobbit movies, but the fact that they had to leave anything out of a 474 minute adaptation of a book that was 300 pages long is mind-boggling to me.

Unheard of actors is generally a good thing when doing a new series: there isn't really a series where it's felt like a good thing that it was being initially run as "starring <well known actor>". If they're any good at all (and most actors are absolutely fine) then they'll be good.

The CGI on the other hand I agree though I can put my finger on exactly the issue: the virtual sets "feel" small in the footage I've seen. There's a certainly quality to the limitations of CGI which generally constrains the camera because you can't actually pull out far enough to make it feel large (I suspect getting the lighting to cast onto the actors right is also a subtle challenge here).

idk, all of the best characters in game of thrones were the established actors. ned stark, Robert baratheon, roose Bolton, tywin lanister.

There are "established actors", if Michael McElhatton is the standard we're using, in the new show. Sean Bean was the biggest draw in GoT and was gone after the first season. When we're quibbling over the resumes of character actors, we've conceded the main point, which is that GoT didn't use star power to attract its following.

I'm not quibbling over anything. I disagree with "Unheard of actors is generally a good thing when doing a new series" and the logic provided. It's just ridiculous on its face. Generally, people with more experience produce better results. Generally, people who have a history of producing better results produce better results. Who would have thought?

That's wildly not the case in the performing arts; just, like, a crazy thing to say. Stars get cast over and over again because audiences are comforted by familiar faces, not because the stars themselves are somehow the best actors in the world. Ben Affleck is a leading man, for Christ's sake.

You managed to ignore "generally" twice (specifically put in to avoid your exact kind of response), construct a strawman argument for me, and then failed to actually defeat that strawman argument. Who is talking about "stars?" None of the cast I mentioned in the original comment are stars. They're ESTABLISHED, EXPERIENCED, PROVEN actors. That's literally the whole point I was making.

And your response to the strawman you constructed is... there is zero correlation between stardom and acting ability? It kind of seems like you and the op are saying there is an INVERSE correlation. But I'm the crazy talker here? okay.

Yes, if we're going to just accept the "crazy talk" rhetoric (I'm fine with it!), I stand by what I said: you are the crazy talker here. :)

I do love that citing Ben Affleck forced you to retreat into "I said generally!" though. We agree on something!

Looks like you're confusing experienced actors with popular actors. Just because the actors are not popular does not mean that they are not experienced and distinguished actors; furthermore just because an actor is popular does not mean they are experienced or distinguished.

Idk. I don’t think most actors are fine. It doesn’t take much skill to pass suspension of disbelief that they’re not acting. It takes a lot of skill to be an engaging character.

Severance comes to mind as a good show that is immediately more appealing to me due to Adam Scott

Numenor alone has enough to make a good series - you've got epic characters, great events, powerful kings, beauty, love, treachery, doom, magic, battles, betrayal and ruin. I've seen decent series done on much less than that.

So agree, its such a tragic story, the people of Numenor had life so good, until Sauron tricked them into throwing it all away. For me it was one of Tolkien's strongest stories and I always felt like it should have major screen time as it was a truly epic tale.

I'm really surprised they didn't try to milk the Silmarillion (I've heard rumors of not being able to get the rights or something), because those tales are detailed enough to tell you how the plot goes, but sparse enough that you could write in tons of things if you wanted to.

Beren and Luthien would make a fantastic tale as well.

Disguising themselves as a vampire and a werewolf to steal a Silmaril from Morgoth in the pits of Angband? Makes the quest of Mt Doom look like a picnic. Pity we'll never see it

> Beren and Luthien would make a fantastic tale as well.

And the fall of Gondolin. And the Children of Húrin. Though not with a happy ending, both of them.

Still, Gondolin has a great journey, love, betrayal, and an epic siege with mechanical dragons and balrogs.

Húrin is more of a greek tragedy than an American TV series, but I'd still love it.

Did you ever see the Finnish LoTR series Hobitit?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobitit

Or the Soviet adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khraniteli

Besides Sean Bean — who was far from A-list — how many of the Games of Thrones cast were well-known? Jason Momoa and Pedro Pascal, who’ve probably had the most post-GoT success so far (and who were two of the most popular/memorable characters on GoT), didn’t have widespread recognition before GoT.

I haven't seen GoT but Jason Momoa was already a decently well known name before that show, he has been in other things and he is so unique, once you've seen him you never forget him.

Famous for Stargate Atlantis? He was great in that but not well known.

He was on Baywatch and North Shore before that.

Famous is probably the wrong word, but he was known in the TV industry. Basically if you were adding an "exotic beefcake" to an ensemble cast someone would suggest Jason Momoa.

> Besides Sean Bean — who was far from A-list — how many of the Games of Thrones cast were well-known?

None A-list, obviously, but (in no particular order) Lena Headey, Iain Glenn, Natalie Dormer, Peter Dinklage, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, & Charles Dance, arguably.

Game of Thrones was packed with a murderer's row of character actors from British stage and screen.

Yeah, it probably explains why a lot of Americans had not heard about them.

Lena headey will always be on my A-list because of terminator:scc

Good question, Like you mentioned, Sean Bean(very well known from goldeneye and LOTR), Lena Hedley was known for her terminator work, Peter Dinklage(Elf, Nip/Tuck), and lets not forget Natalie Dormer(playing Anne Boylen on the tudors, a popular TV series a few years before GOT). Basically if you watched popular scifi/historical shows/movies these characters(some) were well known.

Ser Bronn spent seven weeks at the UK chart number one, bestselling single of 1995, had an album that went 6x platinum and another that went 4x platinum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robson_%26_Jerome

https://youtube.com/watch?v=r5V8ecsrxeY

Ian McShane was Lovejoy on British TV for 8 years and after GoT has been in John Wick; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McShane

Ian McShane was a major Cast member in HBO’s deadwood like 20 years ago

Ian McShane was in exactly as many GoT episodes as Ed Shireen: one. He’s hardly a star of the show.

thinking back to the bakshi film really makes me wish we could get an animated tolkien anthology like the animatrix or heavy metal. imo that would be a very good way to handle something like the silmarillion.

Technicality wise, I think the show looks solid that you can smell the money.

I am not sure about your last complaint, the original LOTR is 20 years old, the actors/actress involved are in their 50s/60s (Sean Bean!), I am not sure what is your argument there, like what connection you want to establish?

While Tolkien certainly has plenty of material that could be filmed, most of it seems to be in short story format where each story would be an hour or two. Amazon is assuredly looking for another Game of Thrones and I don't think they can get that from Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales or Children of Hurin.

Only there is no material to work from - so they've basically taken the same strategy as the final season of GoT did but they're doing that from the start.

There is loads of material to draw from. The Unfinished Tales, the 13 tomes of the History of Middle Earth, some drafts that emerged later. The Lord of the Rings is tiny in comparison. Some of the endings are missing, and some are only roughly sketched, but having the general outline of millennia of history really helps filling the blanks.

With that kind of money they could have bought DeepMind in 2014.

Given this other recent fantasy show on prime was just horrible, I am not surprised by this. Strangely, a lot of people liked it! Maybe it is going to be the same here. Don't even remember the name of this other show.

Wheel of Time. I enjoyed it.

Same, but then I also never read the books.

Didn't read the books either. Just such a badly written show with horrible actors.

Yeah, I’ll disagree there, it’s decently written with good actors. Far worse shows out there, like everything from MCU.

We clearly have different tastes. I really liked Loki, for example. And I even enjoy Miss Marvel!

> 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 anything remarkable and seem to have just done other Amazon shows.

With the exception of, say, the first season of True Detective, most TV shows use multiple directors. The director on a TV show is usually in charge of the technical execution of the writers script - they’re not making many creative decisions the way a movie director does. The creative authority on a TV show generally rests on the lead writer(s), not the directors. When people talk about the Sopranos, they talk about David Chase; Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan. And in both of those cases they had teams of writers under them who would write different episodes. This didn’t stop those shows from having a strong auteur-driven vision.

In the case of the LotR show, the lead writers are JD Payne and Patrick McKay. I think they’re passionate about Tolkien from what I’ve read. Look them up if you want to know more.

In TV 'Mr. Big' is usually the 'Showrunner'. Basically the original creators. It's like a form of creative production and management.

For film, the Director is often kind of the version of 'Showrunner'.

If the director was the one doing the pitching, raising the money - they they are that.

If it's a big IP asset, like Star Treck, then it's different, sometimes a team effort.

Like Kathleen Kennedy is the 'Big Honcho' for Star Wars and will have absolutely the 'last word' on everything, directors may not. Directors may have to negotiate their degree of freedom and may really want to avoid those situations where they are 'not in control', and will be forced to 'take notes'.

So 'director', depending on the type of show, does not have to be the most critical thing, it really depends.

Something that's heavily dependent on the quality of the acting, probably the director will matter a lot.

A perfunctory serial, a bit less.

For something so fundamentally institutionalized, like 'The Big Bang Theory' I'll bet you could remove almost any single person, and the gap would be filled in by the others who are all professionals. Like literally a child could direct an episode, because everyone would know 'what to do'.

But yeah, it helps to have a 'core creative team' that has track record of resonance, this way, you have an idea of what you will get.

Cohen Brothers, Villeneuve, Tom Cruise Inc., they use a lot of the same people. So you have less risk.

Sure - the MCU uses a lot of TV directors for example - since it functions more like a TV show than a auteur-driven series of films.

And because it's a lot cheaper.

The creative elements in MCU films are (mostly) not director-driven, they are franchise-driven. You need a 'good' director and a 'good' script, with 'good' and 'famous' actors, from there, so long as the creative leads are professional and the budget is there, you're good.

I believe that DC suffers from bad creative direction and bad scripts. Most of the rest is workable.

Star Wars suffers from bad stories/scripts and Kathleen Kennedy interference politics.

Am I the only one struggling to understand this? Are 'Mr. Big' and 'Showrunner' references to something specific? Why are these terms in quotes?

He’s putting those in quotes because they’re generally not formal positions that are explicitly credited, but are informal phrases referring to whoever has final creative control over a series.

That sounds like it's all a bit made up then...

It’s not. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showrunner

So these are real terms then...

Showrunners are a thing. See eg https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hollywood+repor... for some stories from the trenches.

"Mr. Big" and "Head Honcho" are euphemisms for "the person who is actually in charge", or the boss.

"Director" and "Showrunner" are job titles you'd have on your resume. In the case of the showrunner, they're directly involved in day to day stuff. I've heard interviews in which showrunners say their job involves making 500 snap decisions every day: "which fabric swatch should we use? is it worth an extra $80k to film in this location?" that kind of thing. I guess the software equivalent would be a product manager? In Kathleen Kennedy's case, as head of Lucasfilm, she's making big decisions on everything, but likely not micromanaging individual decisions. So, she'd be the CTO or equivalent.

Showrunner isn't a job title though. Most likely the actual title on the resume would most likely be "Executive Producer".

Showrunner is definitely job. It's something you put on your resume.

'Executive Producer' is just a credit, it doesn't mean anything really. A powerful actor participating in a film, might get an exec prod. credit, not for doing anything at all.

> the showrunner

This term seems to have entered common usage quite recently.

Q: Why?

"In United States network television [the showrunner is] typically credited as an executive producer"[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showrunner

You can't use the terms interchangeably. An "Executive producer" credit may be applied to lots of people who are not the showrunner.

>This credit is given to the showrunner, or the head writer, and is sometimes also given to other important members of the production. These could include the show’s creator if different from the showrunner, other high-level writers (often future seasons’ showrunners), the owner/creator of source material, a show’s star, the star or writer or creator’s manager, a high-level executive or creative type (like Steven Spielberg) influential in the show’s creation, or any other number of people.

>Many TV shows have multiple executive producers, and without knowing the specific situation, it’s hard to say what the individual people do. For instance, a TV show derived from a movie (like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), may bring with it Executive Producers from the original film, who have little direct involvement with the show.

> You can't use the terms interchangeably

Right, but what's the actual definition of the term "showrunner"?

It's "the leading producer", according to the first sentence of that Wikipedia article. Why aren't we talking about the "lead[ing] producer"?

Is the term "showrunner" perhaps just industry jargon that slipped out into the mainstream?

EDIT: Go read through the Wikipedia:Talk page for 'Showrunner'[0], the quote "so much conflicting terminology, contradictions within contradictions" seems pretty apt. An ill-defined and (?) informal position?

Q: Is it just me or are people - particularly journalists - desperate to use terms that make them sound like they're part of the "in" crowd?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Showrunner

The showrunner is the person responsible for the long-term trajectory and story health of a tv show. It's a real term (Joss Whedon is the showrunner for the Whedon-verse shows), but "leading producer" is not a term, it's an attempt at a description.

The showrunner can also have one of several actual official titles.

To answer the specific question in "Ack", it's a recognition of the person who is day-to-day the final decision maker. They can be overruled from above by executives (the showrunner is not the supreme content creator overlord), but the executives are overseeing a lineup or channel. The showrunner is the one who are making sure the season goes right as a full-time job.

> It's a real term [..] the showrunner can also have one of several actual official titles

Q: Is "showrunner" an official title, or not?

EDIT: apparently not[0]:

"The highest ranking producer is the showrunner, the man or woman ultimately responsible for the creative direction of the series. Showrunner is a function, not a title — this person is credited as an Executive Producer. In many cases, he or she has “Created by” credit on the series"

[0] https://johnaugust.com/2004/producer-credits-and-what-they-m...

EDIT2: "A showrunner is the unofficial title given to the top-level creative decision maker and manager overseeing all episodes of an individual season of a television/episodic series. The showrunner is usually credited as an executive producer, producer and/or writer. "[1]

[1] https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/filmography-credi...

You are misrepresenting those definitions a bit. Or they are poorly written.

Showrunner is a thing, TV projects have them. They are the 'nexus' - both creative and a bit operational of the show. Like the 'founder' and 'visionary' of the show. They also kind of 'make the show happen'.

Dan Levy is the 'Showrunner' for Schitt's Creek.

Just type the name of your favorite TV show along with 'showrunner' and you'll see who it is.

Usually will be 'creator' and 'writer'. They will probably get a producer credit. Note that 'showrunner' is generally not a specific kind of 'credit' but that a feature 'credit' isn't really a title either. 'Exec. Producer' can mean anything. Or nothing.

The 'director' in TV is generally less important.

For film, usually the Director kind of plays that role as the lead visionary, especially if they pitched and raised the money, got the team together, got the actors to sign up etc..

Producers are generally not directly creative visionaries.

Actually, you could say we're in the middle of a transition. All the Marvel shows have used one director for the whole season of their shows, and they're not the only ones to have moved on to this format.

As for OP's point, with the series' budget so high, a gun-for-hire TV director might not be accoustemed to the staggering budget they have to manage.

Not one of the Marvel Shows would break any reasonable TV top 10. The "1-2 showrunners, a writers room, and a rotating cast of directors" model is unimpeachably successful; it got us Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Americans, and Mad Men, among many others.

Atlanta and Barry both have small director pools, being mostly Hiro Murai and the series star/creator. Even those benefit from being able to switch for tonal benefit.

To some extent I think Louie set the precedent there, as CK was given complete creative control. Comedians were asking for "the Louis deal". Glover (and Ansari) seemed to get it, and both had the sense to hire other talented people. Louie (the show) suffers from its self-indulgence to the point it can't be rated that highly, where Atlanta maybe mostly avoids that fate.

Barry has something like 11 writers, and 6 directors, though Berg and Hader direct most of them. Arguably, writing in TV shows is more (or at least equally as) important than direction.

Also, say, things coming out of the other end of Disney: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandalorian#Episodes

But are those representative of the average 1-2 showrunner outputs? No. They’re not. Most tv sucks. The fact that some shows are not in the top 10 greatest series of all time is irrelevant.

I would say the marvel tv series so far have been pretty solid. Even if you don’t like them because you have an allergic reaction to marvel, their execution has been really good.

If we must talk of THE BEST, then season 1 of American gods on StarZ was the best season of television I’ve ever seen. Mostly all written by Bryan fuller and Michael Greene. Not entirely. How do we weigh this? Hard to say, but man did that show crash and burn when they left.

Most of everything sucks. The point is that the showrunner model, with rotating directors and writers, is the industry norm; it's not some goofy thing Amazon is doing to cut costs.

I saw the first season of American Gods on Starz as well. It did not motivate me to watch the second season. That same year, though, we had The Good Place (showrunner), Better Call Saul (showrunner), The Deuce (showrunner), The Leftovers (showrunner), Maisel (showrunner), and Legion (showrunner). I think the model acquits itself nicely.

They're limited series, effectively just glorified really long movies cut into 6 episodes. They also don't have real showrunners because Kevin Feige calls the shots on overall continuity and vision. It's doubtful that 5-9 season television is ever going to go to this model.

That also has to do with the short length of the series.

Having a single director direct 24 1 hour episodes is probably impossible.

This isn't even true, I went and looked up the directors for Daredevil out of curiousity and each season has a bunch.

Edit: I guess you're referring to the various recent miniseries Marvel has been doing? It's never been uncommon in miniseries, for fairly obvious reasons.

Legion is at least one counter-example. They used award winning indie film directors on a per-episode basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(TV_series)

The result was that each episode often had a very distinct style, which matched well to the underlying theme of schizophrenia.

> Actually, you could say we're in the middle of a transition.

I recently noted the same while watching Severance. Almost all of the episodes, barring one or two, were directed by Ben Stiller. I found it one of the best (first) series ever.

i would argue that in many cases, having multiple directors is actually one of the great benefits of television and even within the constraints of a show, they still have considerable freedom to define the tone. tv is also a great format for relative unknowns to find their voice. steven spielberg was an 'unremarkable' tv director until he worked on Columbo and his episode- The Perfect Murder was a breakthrough that still stands apart to this day. similarly, put together any two episodes of the x files and the range is pretty incredible, Grotesque and Jose Chung's From Outer Space are only a few episodes apart and they might as well be entirely different shows.

I don't think having the names recognizable is a sign of anything. If you look into the history of what are the iconic classic movies now, you'd see that it's not unusual to have people who are either relatively unknown or nothing special to come into one great movie and have a spectacular career afterwards. Great movie can launch an actor, but great actor alone can rarely save a bad movie.

I am much more concerned about show's creators attempts to "improve" Tolkien and turn it into a Platform(TM) for the Message(TM), instead of concentrating on telling a good story using the material Tolkien left us. That, unfortunately, is not an uncommon occurrence nowdays. If that happens, the series is doomed to mediocrity or worse, regardless of which names are attached to it or how much is spent on it.

Still, we obviously have to see it before making any judgement.

Having Jackson even nominally involved in the project would be a pretty terrible sign for me, after the Hobbit fiasco (which in turn colored my appraisal of ROTK and, in particular, the extended LOTR editions).

As for the writer's room on this show, it looks solid to me:

* Jason Cahill wrote a bunch of episodes for The Sopranos

* Justin Doble wrote 4 episodes in S1 and S2 of Stranger Things, and those are the only two good seasons of Stranger Things

* Gennifer Hutchison won a WGA award for her work on Breaking Bad, which is one of the best shows ever to air

* Bryan Cogman wrote 11(!) episodes of Game of Thrones

* Stephany Folsom was a writer on Toy Story 4 and Thor: Ragnarak

The two show-runners (JD Payne and Patrick McKay) are people I'm not familiar with, but so was DB Weiss before Game of Thrones.

Except for Sean Bean, I didn't know any of the GOT actors either; they're all famous for GOT now. The Amazon LOTR show could be a debacle, but it won't be because they chintzed out on actors.

Minor quibble, but add Charles Dance to your big name actors list. I can't think of any others though... dinklage was kind of known I guess?

Agree with Jackson being terrible to even have on for consulting due to what he did to The Hobbit. I wasn’t happy with what he did with some key scenes in LOTR either. I feel the main reason he was left out though is because there might be animosity between him and the Tolkien family in terms of art direction.

The Hobbit production was so heavily rushed, I wouldn’t hold the quality issues against Jackson.

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.

They are probably hoping this is season 1 of 10 of a breakout show. Impossible to do that if you use famous actors in season 1 (unless they die in season 1 like Sean Bean in Game of Thrones) because they will all be demanding untenable salaries by season 3 killing the shows ability to continue. I’m stoked for such a high budget fantasy show to be coming out and don’t really care how true to Tolkien it is so long as the story and characters are compelling.

> I don’t recognize the actors at all.

That's a good sign. First, there are far more great actors than famous actors. Second, that's how you get someone to make a 7 season (or longer) commitment. Look at the MCU. They don't get A-listers (except Ryan Reynolds), they make them in return for an N-movie commitment.

The MCU also seemed to transition to hiring lesser-known directors, etc. so they could be trusted to be willing to follow the directions from corporate.

I don't particularly need something done super-artistically. I need a long-running series to be managed well. Otherwise you end up with all the situations where the series takes an abrupt turn and fucks itself up.

> And not to involve Jackson seems off because even having him in a consulting role would be a good sign.

Probably better that way. The project has no right for the 3rd age, meaning the stories of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit-Books, where Jacksons main-expertise is. Not having him involved is just safer for the legal side.

Sometimes a director prefers unknown actors so the audience doesn’t have an existing association with them.

> 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.

Wasn't the estate’s unhappiness with Jackson’s work (either genuine or as part of the long rights war) a big part of that?

The established creator thing is so important. For things where the parameters of success are hard to define (what makes a hit movie?) there is no good marker of skill other than having done it before.

This is a bezos driven project. He has said he loves LOTR. Take that how you will, but i'm sure Bezos is directly involved, especially with the budget so high.

Not involving Jackson, the guy who wanted to put Aragorn in the Hobbit, sounds like a good idea

Amazon investing in the LOTR world (with an established fan base) I would think it's less risky than Netflix's strategy of burning hundreds of millions on famous producers without any criteria than just to produce something good- more often than not being misses rather than hits.

"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.

$465 million for one season of TV seems very expensive.

But $465 million as part of the bootstrapping/rnd budget for some new gpu-adjacent compute offering would be pretty easy to justify ... and potentially being able to move some of the development cost associated with that new cloud offering out of aws and into some other budgetary boundary is almost certain to provide stock boosting effects.

It seems obvious to me that the tech companies with streaming platforms have started using tv/movie production budgets as a way to fund research into offerings appropriate for development teams that are highly-creative/technically competent/and driven by result oriented pressure. Adding value to the production stacks used by those kinds of teams is hard but also technically worthwhile and pretty measurable. And having discerning and hard to please customers as early partners/beta testers for a new service could be very valuable.

I suspect Apple is doing this kind of thing as well with their shows where you can see the same or similar high-end visual effects appearing on multiple of their shows -- feels like the kind of thing you'd expect to happen with different creative teams using converging 'in-house' tooling ...

250 Million was just licensing. So they're starting in a deep hole.

Strange, Amazon seem to went the budget route for "Wheel of Time" which I enjoyed, (though popular I hadn't read any of the books). The effects were good, acting was good.

But think of the product placement offerings Middle Earth offers amazon. The amazon prime delivery wagon. Alexa smart speakers were bountiful in that time as were "fire" tablets, forged from dragons breath.

The acting in wheel of time was not good. It was bad enough to ruin the whole thing for me. Acting in high fantasy can be really tough because the rolls are commonly so different from what the actors are used to, but they did not get it done.

An observation from an online review of WoT that I agreed with is that the writers were far more comfortable writing scenes that were not in the original material than they were adapting existing scenes from the book.

This does leave one to wonder why they bothered to license the books though. It's well agreed upon that it is a difficult property to adapt to screen, and the first season is (IMO) further evidence of that.

P.S. The acting was merely "okay" for me; Pike (Moiraine) absolutely nailed her part, others were more hit-or-miss (my wife who had not read the books also liked Rutherford as Perrin). I don't know if Harris did a good job, or if it's just that Mat has the most personality of any actor, but I liked him as well; either way Harris is not going to be in Season 2, so it's moot going forward.

This is going to be terrible. I can't imagine the SHEER FUCKING HUBRIS modern TV writers must have of they think they can write a fanfic that stands next to Tolkien's greatest work.

These writers' only experience is working on a 4th film in JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot universe which ended up getting cancelled too.

Quality doesnt matter anymore. It will get views because it has a brand attached to it and lots of people already have prime.

I don't know what their break even number is but prime is fucking expensive. If this pushes 1% of people who are on the edge of buying prime and not buying prime into making that decision its a massive win for them.

I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made.

>I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made.

what is the most objective judge of quality if not what people are willing to watch

I don't know. I don't think popular can be equated with good though. Love is Blind was hugely popular. It is terrible tv. The same can be said about most content. If you come up with an objective system that everyone agrees on you will be a billionaire. But anyone can tell you that popular doesnt equal good.

As a desperate Star Wars fan, I concur. It is a canon and world I am so bought into that I will consume substandard content. I imagine the same applies to LOTR fans.

As a long-time SW fan, I can't do it anymore. Book of Boba Fett was so plodding and awful I am washing my hands of Disney Wars.

> But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made.

As the amount of things being made seemingly have increased tenfold, while the amount of watchable stuff seems at best to stay level, I say the figure is probably closer to 99% as we speak.

And the overzealous eagerness to retell already successful stories, but with the message[0] forcefully attached, is causing noticeable political fatigue in increasing portions of what could have been the mainstream demographic.

But the fact that they keep doing on it, implies they think it makes financially sense? Anyone got any more background on what’s going on behind the scenes here?

[0] https://youtu.be/G2CG1R7nVJg

Yeah I realized a while back that the quantity of content that is being created is largely due to the fact that many more demographics are being targeted widely now.

As a white 20-40 year old guy 50 years ago nearly 100% of the mainstream content was targeted at me or my family. Now that number is lower. I don't think its drastically lower but lets say its 80%. That means at least 20% of the content that is being created in 2022 I'll pop on and go, "Eh. Not for me." Which is great. Because for someone else who has been watching content not targeted at them their entire life they turn on and go, "Holy shit this is exactly what I want."

Easy way to make that content? Just retell the same stories and change things around a bit so other demographics can relate to it.

> I don't think it will be any good. But 95% of film and tv is terrible and it keeps getting made.

Yep.

And unlike Netflix, Amazon has deep pockets, to take such a huge gamble.

Personally, based on everything I've heard I've set my expectations to be very low.

I could take it or leave it.

I'll wait for people to watch it and if they tell me it's not good I won't even bother.

I love this series so much to not sully my memories of it by even watching this to find out just how bad it is.

I don't need the currency of being able to bitch about it or complain or to say that I knew it was gonna suck.

That's how much I like the original Peter Jackson movies.

> prime is fucking expensive

Prime is similar to or cheaper than Netflix (depending on your Netflix plan), and yet also includes "free shipping", a selection of free movies, a selection of free books, all the "Prime Gaming" goodies, and a bunch of other stuff.

Netflix, meanwhile, charges you extra for 4k (and by some perspectives, HD).

I dunno, Prime doesn't feel that expensive, even if it is more than Disney+ or HBO.

I guess if you put it next to netflix its not that expressive but I rarely use Prime for video. Once in a while something happens to be on there and its nice but 8/10 times their movie is only available on some channel I have to pay extra for.

I'd probably view prime differently if they allowed me to pay monthly like netflix or other services.

I think the issue is not that quality doesn't matter. If any, it matters more than anything.

The issue is, execs have no idea at all of what is quality. In fact, they more often than not lower the quality of the films and series with their changes.

Quality matters if you care about having a cash cow and not just a one off. Paramount+ is big on telling us halo TV's first episode set records on their service, but I haven't seen any data from other episodes which is telling. I don't think that a series scoring 6 on rotten tomatoes can continually smash records and continue to look like a sound investment for media buyers.

The first episode auto played for me after I finished another show. It wasn't on more than a minute, but I wouldn't be surprised if events like that helped drive the record.

> Quality matters if you care about having a cash cow and not just a one off.

I'm not trying to be provocative, but how do you explain superhero movies then? They all seem to be the same and are a huge cash cow.

IMHO, if you throw hundreds of millions of dollars at something and the same in marketing, they will come because the majority of people will just watch what's on.

Because those do have quality to them. Actors and directors people have heard of, no money held back on production budget, and people actually think they are good movies. Avengers infinity war has a 91% fan rating on rotten tomatoes and an 85% critic rating. These marvel movies aren't one offs, they are a constant cash cow of seemingly consistent quality in the eyes of their fans who fill these theaters.

Meanwhile with the halo series you just don't have that. No one has heard of the actors or directors. It's been widely panned by critics and fans. It probably will be cancelled before long once paramount can no longer ride off the success of the first episode which if it doesn't continue means people were baited into watching it with the Halo IP more than anything.

Yeah superhero movies are not quality TO ME. But I have family members who do and will see every single marvel thing made. Even the ones they dont love they will enjoy because its the characters they enjoy and its building a universe they are invested in.

They are well filmed. The action tends to be good. They have stars in them. They have characters in them people care about. Those are all things that will draw a lot of people towards them.

Halo has 1-2 characters people give a shit about and zero stars. The LOTR show seems to be the same...

I'm not saying you HAVE to have those things for something to be quality but to keep people coming back those things help a lot.

It's probably just a job. Some Amazon executive says, "Hey, can you write us some Lord of the Rings episodes for X dollars?" Writer says, "Sure." I don't think hubris enters into it, the same way that construction workers don't usually compare their output to the Roman Colosseum.

I also don't think that the Tolkien universe is somehow sacrosanct. If the show sucks, then it sucks - it doesn't take away from the original writing. There's plenty of bad media based on the Tolkien books as well as endless merchandise and other cash grabs. There's even a Gandalf Funko POP[1], for goodness sakes.

It would be great if the show was good though. We'll see. As others have mentioned, Amazon studios seems to have pretty poor taste and produce a lot of crap. Though Patriot is quite excellent.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Funko-Movies-Gandalf-Action-Figure/dp...

The problem is that these things don't exist in a vaccuum. The funko pop doesn't really matter, its not taking many resources from other projects. This show potentially is taking resources, talent, money etc. If it sucks, that means chances are there will be a very long dry spell before investors decide to try another Tolkein work. So it does kind of take things away from the fandom if it does end up sucking and burning money without much to show for it.

> If it sucks, that means chances are there will be a very long dry spell before investors decide to try another Tolkein work.

After seeing the fruits of the investors being involved I think I'm ok with that.

> If the show sucks, then it sucks - it doesn't take away from the original writing.

I disagree. Tolkien's work is not just a story; it is a fictional world. Merchandise exists outside that world, but new stories in that world become an inherent part of that world. Good stories elevate the value of that world. Bad stories damage the value of that world.

Keeping with your first example, imagine if a cheap, ugly, concrete, brutalist structure was added onto the Roman Colosseum. The original structure may still be a work of art, but the addition would detract from it. Imagine putting cheap steak sauce on an expertly prepared, high-quality steak. The steak may still be delicious, but its value would be lessened by the added sauce. The same is true for fictional worlds like Tolkien's.

All that said, most of my favorite fictional worlds from my childhood have been tarnished by cheap cash grabs, so I have learned to scrape the sauce off the steak and enjoy the original for as much as I can. It's still a great steak, after all. If Amazon's show bombs - which seems likely - I'll do the same for Tolkien's works.

Eh. It wouldn't be the first forgotten Lord of The Rings show/movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubynOv3VKB8

Despite their popularity, tolkien's works were considered simplistic and juvenile. And tastes do vary, but the books aren't particularly great

Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested.

And the "internet" really reacted negatively to the trailer as well. (I personally didn't hate the trailer myself but after having watched the original trilogy and the first Hobbit movie, I was feeling a bit underwhelmed cause it didn't do a good job selling the show to me.) So it really remains to be seen whether it will be a hit when it does to go to streaming.

> Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch? DVD Sales? Increasing sign ups to Prime? I have a doubt the profits from that will help them earn money to cover up the remaining 300 million or so they have still invested.

Probably all of the above plus it's a long term move.

Amazon needs to build up a strong catalog and marquee TV shows are long term attractions. As an example, Mad Men, especially because it's set in the 1960s will probably still be watched in the 2060s. Game of Thrones would have been the exact thing but D&D completely tore it apart in the last 2 seasons.

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 budget.

Obviously COVID would have affected the budget for the show, but I have a feeling that it went way over budget than was initially intended.

Although I agree with the marquee concept. HBO had their own marquee show: Game of Thrones, though it produced a lot of quality stuff like the Pacific, Band of Brothers, Sopranos etc that can be watched for years to come. Game of Thrones on the other hand was a big disappointment for the fans and its negative reception probably made HBO wonder what they would do after it was over (hence the Targaryen origin show and the Jon Snow series are being developed... personally I'm skipping both)

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.

Last 2 seasons of GoT still hurt to think about.

It's not the ending that hurts it's how it got there. The last 2 seasons probably should have been 3 full seasons instead of the barely 1.5 we got and had a lot more build up/Dany descent into madness/Bran having some relevance that would justify his elevation to ruler, etc.

The suddenness of everything, the exposition, everything was just poorly executed. Too much money spent on CG dragons, not enough money spent on episodes telling the story.

The books can remedy my pain but have already waited so long. :(

I think the last two could have been 10 seasons and it would have been bad. The issue wasn’t cramming too much material, the issue is they didn’t have writers with ideas. They had been adapting GRRM and ran out of material to adapt and just went batty.

I think the reason it is so compressed is because they could just charge through it quickly and make it work.

D&D were also trying to wrap it up quickly so they could move on to making the Star Wars series (that they subsequently got canned from).

Spoiler! Maybe edit

Is there a need to conceal spoilers from a massively popular show that aired its final seasons 5 and 3 years ago, respectively?

It's been over for three years now, one of those years where everyone was inside for a long time, and was very hotly debated on social media. I think it meets the criteria for not needing a spoiler warning

I'll never forget the day someone on the subway shouted "I can't believe character X dies!"

idk man that ending hurt pretty bad

edit: also the complete destruction of Jamie's character out of the blue in one scene jfc

Yeah they did my boi Jamie pretty raw. :(

>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 even watching Game of Thrones now and how much interest will it generate in the future ? Unless this LOTR show is somehow groundbreaking with visuals (and it's a lot harder to do now then back when they did the films because the bar was so low back then) - I doubt it's a valuable long term play.

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.

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.

We all used to watch TV from the 50’s and 60’s in the 80’s and 90’s. You pick up on the context as you watch. A lot of situations are universal and timeless.

In America and Europe, yes. Landlines are still being used elsewhere.

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

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

I still enjoy a good episode with Jessica in Cabot Cove, the murder capital of the world.

Gobsmacked, How can you look at that list and say "seinfeld is the only one that people still watch"?

One....that's a subjective thing, two..several shows on that list are currently in syndication, three....several are still running.

> It’ll be watched for decades.

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

> The hit Warner Bros. sitcom from the 90s, Friends, is still a big moneymaker for the studio with average earnings that are estimated to be roughly a billion dollars per year. Keep in mind that this is a show that ended nearly 15 years ago. Beyond all imagination, this is still one of the most-watched sitcoms in 2017. I know, hard to believe.

https://reelrundown.com/tv/How-Much-Money-Does-US-Sitcom-Fri...

I specifically mentioned Friends and Seinfeld as exceptions. Mad Men is never going to have this status. Friends viewership numbers were 10x, even Sopranos had 2-3x viewership. And there will be no nostalgia factor there.

And even if it DOES become evergreen, it's like Disney kid shows - sent to live in whatever monthly app (Prime in this case) to rot and die; there's not much realized revenue from them, the way syndication has.

> defining shows you watch for nostalgia (eg. Seinfeld, Friends)

But what about new viewers? As someone who is too "young" to have seen them originally, I don't find either of those to be funny. But something much older, such as Fawlty Towers, stands the test of time.

Keep in mind that Amazon needs to get only ~0.2M incremental Amazon Prime subscribers to recoup the investment. The lifetime value (LTV) of a Prime subscriber has been estimated at ~$2,300.[a] You can play around with the figure, but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks, I wouldn't be surprised is Amazon ends up getting far more than ~0.2M new Prime subscribers because of it.

[a] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/21/whats-a-pr...

EDIT: Updated the figures to more accurate (based on LTV).

Isn't it more complicated than that? Many of those consumers already own Prime. How will this impact their desire to stay? Will people actually buy Prime for this and then keep it, or will they watch and then cancel?

Your analysis makes sense, but I was under the impression that RoP was a pure passion project from Jeff Bezos with no regard for the financials or for a return on investment.

Based on what, second or third hand sources?

Jeff Bezos isn’t spending the money, Amazon is.

I'm a fan, I've got Prime, and I'm not interested in the slightest, I'm done watching giant companies ruin good franchises and legacy characters. Would have to put a gun to my head to watch this one

In Poland Amazon Prime is only 10 usd / year. So the math is much harder outside the US.

Wow that sounds like an amazing value, even with differences in purchasing power. Is amazon's retail network decent in Poland?

> but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks

Citation needed. I'm a big fan of LOTR, but I didn't even bother with the last Hobbit movie. And I expect this series to be even worse than that.

I stopped after the first Hobbit movie and I'm very unlikely to watch this unless it gets rave reviews.

Come on, it's really unlikely this show will be worse than the Hobbit movie.

I am not so sure that your statement is obviously true. One of the issues with The Hobbit films is that they stretched one relatively short book into three movies...this time around, it looks like they're stretching some apocrypha from the appendix of a book into an 8-episode TV show. Feels like a fairly similar effort to wring blood from a stone.

Not that I am interested in defending Amazon's series, which I think will be a disaster, but I don't think the comparison with the Hobbit movies holds.

True, the material they have rights to is from the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings. The difference, though, is that in this case they are going to create a completely new story. So, they can fill as many episodes they want.

With the Hobbit, instead, they had the story already and they had to stretch it to create a trilogy.

My opinion on this matter has less to do with stretching and more to do with creating. It feels like the further we get from what the author actually wrote- in terms of dialogue, characterization, etc.- the worse the final output is. LOTR isn't just good because hobbits, it's good because Tolkien's writing is good. The Jackson trilogy was close-ish to Tolkien's writing, the Hobbit films further, and this even more so. I'm of the opinion that this was a major issue with the last few seasons of Game of Thrones as well.

Exactly this. there's nothing about an existing universe that prevents bad writing for new stories in that universe. And big studio creative talent is at a historical low right now.

I don’t get the “stretched explanation”, there was plenty of material. To me the problem was that the action sequences lacked the emotional gravitas of the LOTR trilogy. It was like watching a video game.

Consider that many fans watch things they routinely disparage online. For example, many Star Wars fans routinely disparage "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," and yet it's still one of the most-watched, highest-grossing movies in the history of cinema.

Also, keep in mind there are people who are really fanatical about LOTR. At the end of the spectrum, some of them enjoy this stuff so much that they regularly attend LOTR conventions dressed up as wizards, knights, hobbits, orcs, etc. Those people will watch the new series even if it's only to criticize all the things it got wrong!

> Consider that many fans watch things they routinely disparage online.

they might not bother to subscribe to Prime for that and instead just get a copy off the high seas

I am one of those people (roughly speaking). Do with that as you will.

Isn't the growth for Amazon Prime kind of stagnating in the US? I don't think they can get 1-2 million sign ups from the US alone.

Plus, there would be folks who would subscribe for two months that the shows runs and then they may even quit.

In India, I am paying 1000 rupees for my yearly subscription to Prime Video although the only thing I watch on it is The Boys. I don't what the numbers for Prime Video are in India, but it would earn them less as compared to someone signing up from the US or UK for sure.

>but given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks, the cost is totally worth it.

There is also a big question mark on this as well.

More like ~0.2M. I updated the figures to use the LTV of a Prime customer :-)

> given that every LOTR fan is going to want to watch this series even if it sucks, I wouldn't be surprised is Amazon ends up getting far more than ~0.2M new Prime subscribers because of it.

You're assuming they actually subscribe to watch it. Amazon Prime already has enough subs that it should be pretty easy for most die-hard LOTR fans without a Prime account to just watch it on a friend or family member's account. Or they could just pirate it.

Amazon Prime customers spend $1968 / year on average.

$465M / $1968 = 236,280

For perspective, Disney Plus added 7.9 million users in just the first quarter of 2022.

Those revenues still have to cover the cost of buying the things they sell to prime members. It’s not pure profit.

I pay $36/yr for Amazon prime. That's over 50x less. You'd need 13M new users who want to pay for just that, and nothing else.

You're comparing profits with revenue and not accounting for risk.

> Even with the rebate, how can they hope to recoup the investment? Merch

Isn’t that why Disney acquired Star Wars and Marvel?

Imagine an Amazon theme park alongside Universal Studios and Disneyland.

Disney got Star Wars for 4B, Star Wars merch is pretty much one of the most iconic and most sought out merch out there, the movies with some exceptions have been financial hits, they have had some good video games on console/PCs and they also have some mobile games that I believe would be raking in the sweet lootcrate money, the theme park attractions no doubt attract many, the Mandalorian was a critical and commercially sucessful show, and it seems despite the dip in quality in their other live action shows, the viewership has only increased.

https://collider.com/obi-wan-kenobi-finale-audience-disney-p....

I sure hope they don't mess it up. LOTR is an amazing series, it would be a shame for it to go the way of the Star Wars prequels and company.

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

World wide format demographics means we have a cookie cutter adaption that probably just plays the script as a checklist needed to be done instead of anything inspiring.

How about a movie on a fictional global shopping conglomerate with a selfish CEO who doesn’t want to pay fair wages.

The IP is only used for its value as a brand.

There’s an argument to be made that such productions are prone to diminishing the value of the brand if they turn out to be subpar. On the other hand, mainstream consumers usually aren’t too demanding. So brands tend to get watered down to minimal viable mediocrity.

I see that argument a lot but my thought is that people just aren't looking at a long enough time frame, I mean everyone was excited for fantastic beasts and it was considered okay, but it made a ton of money because of the brand. But then they made the second one which the general reaction to seems to be "What the HECK?" but it still had decent sells because people liked the brand and most importantly didn't realize they didn't like it until after they had seen it, now fantastic beasts 3 had incredibly low returns because all the brand had been burned at that point.

I think a huge problem is that especially, in the tech sector where things move so fast, people don't realize that many things, especially societal matters can move very slowly from a human perspective. I mean everyone how many big name tech companies do you know off the top of your head that are dying now, slowly, but still making money because of inertia? Some things just take a while someone who loves something can eventually have their love of that thing burned if it goes poorly for long enough.

Right, it can go either way depending on inertia and on how bad it is for how long. But there is a large middle ground of “not good but still profitable”. Recent examples may be The Walking Dead and Star Wars.

And I’d argue that for something to be financially successful it doesn’t need to be especially good, or loved by a large number of people, it just needs to be mildly entertaining and be marketed well.

I mean, some could argue Star Wars hasn't been "good" in almost 40 years.

I thought the same at first but then realized that long after this series disappears from Amazon Prime and our collective consciousness Middle Earth will still be here. That's my hope anyway.

Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.

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 swamped by streaming services people can’t keep up. It’s just becoming work to keep up with these shows. Not to mention the whole thing could end poorly (ie Game of Thrones)

You see this in the prevalence of limited series like Queens Gambit / Obi wan. People are just happy to have a self contained story where they don’t have to work. Or they want throw away, mindless TV that they doesn’t require much deep thinking.

> 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

Not OP, but there's an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to scripted dramas and comedies.

Apple TV+

- Severance

- Ted Lasso

- For All Mankind

- Slow Horses

HBOMax

- We Own This City

- Hacks

- Barry

- Tokyo Vice

- Gentleman Jack

- Peacemaker

- White Lotus

- Curb Your Enthusiasm

- Minx

- Insecure

- Industry

There are many more, but just on those two streamers that's a dozen+ shows that I've been really impressed by in one way or the other over the last year. And my list to watch has just as much on it.

As for a direct recommendation, I highly suggest you check out Severance if you like Westworld. It's slower burn, but similarly twisty sci-fi thriller.

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”.

They should have taken 100M of that and fund the remaining three seasons of The Expanse.

This would have been great! Allthough, as far as I heard, one of the reasons for stopping was the time jump in the books (full disclosure: I didn't read the books).

There is a time jump. But come on, put some gray hair on and some makeup.

I'm pretty sure that we've not seen the end of The Expanse's universe.

Yeah, what was with that planet with the alien dog thing?

I don't want to spoil too much, but that was basically the entirety of a novella which is the beginning of a plot line relevant to the final 3 books in the series.

I don't know why they would include it if they don't have plans on continuing the show in some form in the future. It's not like there was any shortage of content in the mainline story to cover.

I hope you're right, but they had an entire scene in the last episode where the main characters complained at Bezos for cutting off funding.

This is not the mark of a show that they plan to renew. :-(

Haha. Duarte is playing a different game than bezos... I hope. That scene is already in the book.

> This is not the mark of a show that they plan to renew. :-(

Amazon doesn't own the TV/movie rights of The Expanse (beyond the seasons they funded), they're owned by Alcon Entertainment. So basically, whatever Amazon does or doesn't plan to do is kind of irrelevant and there isn't really anything stopping from the show appearing on, say, Netflix, or the BBC in a few years time. This is also why it transferred from SyFy to Amazon relatively easily.

As has been hinted at here, the fact that they included Strange Dogs into season 6 is a pretty clear hint that more is coming. There is no reason to include that if they aren't going to adapt the Laconia storyline at some point, since the only purpose of that story is to introduce us to this new planet and what the Mars rebels discovered there.

I suspect they're going for a film trilogy with a much bigger budget per minute filmed than the TV series. For one thing, some of the action gets a lot bigger in scale. Two, the time jump means all the main characters are now in their 70s and 80s. Avasarala is over 100. Either they go the Twin Peaks route and actually wait 30 years and hope everyone is still alive and working, or they go the Disney route and spend ungodly money on digitally aging everyone. Or they could just recast, but I think doing that as season 7 of the same show would have been pretty jarring.

Can they write around the time jump? Is it that critical to the story?

Eh, maybe. They'd have to handwave a lot about how technology advanced so quickly. The Laconians having much better technology than everyone else is critical.

Yes. But come on, makeup, some gray hair.

As much as I like The Expanse, I miss the old days, when Amazon (or Netflix) would have used the $465M to fund one season of each of 46 high-risk shows -- zero of which would be warmed-over sequels.

After Wheel of Time my expectations are so incredibly low, if it still manages to disappoint I will be impressed.

I'm expecting a shitshow and a shitstorm of epic proportions.

I'm expecting a 465 million dollar joke about the ease of delivering products to Mordor using Amazon's infrastructure. If not in live action then at least as an advertising campaign based in supporting material.

Stop giving them ideas!

If the "ma" of the Amazon logo isn't modified with a pictogram of LOTR landmarks someone needs to get fired. "From A to Z through The Shire" should be their Superbowl campaign.

Wheel of Prime

Yeah, Wheel of Time was really bad. I tried so hard to like it but it had little to redeem it.

Wow I didn't even know that happened until right now. At least they're advertising for Rings of Power.

Have to agree! I'm not sure what I was expecting with Wheel of Time, but I wasn't expecting it to look so cheap. Also one of the central characters wears a pullover in early episodes that's definitely dry-clean only, and had definitely just been dry-cleaned. While it sounds like a little thing, it's the little things that add up to an immersive world.

> Also one of the central characters wears a pullover in early episodes that's definitely dry-clean only, and had definitely just been dry-cleaned.

Wait, which character? If it was Morraine or Lan, then she can totally "dry clean" stuff as needed, right? If it was one of the Emond's Field characters, then yeah, you got a point :)

I think we all would benefit from a 10 year moratorium on taking on epic legacy cultural icons by the current US media and entertainment crowd.

One of the major themes of Wheel of Time is how myth changes over the ages as it passes from person to person, culture to culture. This can be very entertaining in the books because you read the inner thoughts of dozens of protagonists and antagonists. Each of them are ignorant in different ways and nobody really knows exactly how the wheel is going to weave things in the future.

I'm not sure how a narrator or having someone's thoughts read aloud would be done in a show like this, though, and Amazon didn't try. There are definitely a lot of villains in it but from what I saw they couldn't make the subject of ignorance interesting.

I feel like I'm one of the only people here who's actually... quite optimistic and excited about this? Like -- I really don't see Amazon screwing this up. Bezos is a fan of the franchise and is smart enough to know that this can't be screwed up without consequences. I also think that the lack of established talent being hired is actually a good thing, because it means they looked beyond the famous names we've all heard and presumably found a whole collection of diamonds in the rough. If Bezos is willing to spend half a billion on a bunch of unknowns, I'm going to bet that those unknowns are pretty darn promising.

Anyways, thought I'd counter all the pessimism here with a bit of positivity. I'm stoked for this series, and if it turns out bad after all? Oh well, they tried. It wouldn't be the end of the world.

Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good. bezzzos bezzosn my bezzzos

Just like Melkor creating the orcs...

Please no YouTube tier comments.

This is a reference to LOTR creationism/lore.

> $465 million ... New Zealand ... would be rebating the production around 25% of its costs, or $116 million.

So it probably cost $100 mil but Bezos found a way to get NZ taxpayers to pay for it.

That's probably closer to the truth than most other ideas...

does this new Arri camera really cost 4 million a pop? hm... well could be... I'm just a Wellington tax officer...

if it was all just a scam to get NZ to pay for it, presumably they would have kept that going instead of moving production to the UK for subsequent seasons, where they get drastically less tax credits.

There must be some level of tax strategy across these streaming platforms to get a video series to pay for a buildout of IT infrastructure that then gets added to its general AWS service (or iCloud etc). Many US states have wildly generous film tax credits, so it’s almost conning these states into footing the bill for the next AWS data center. (Edit: NZ is paying 25% into this project as an economic and tourism generator)

As others have pointed out, this is a lot of money for a series without recognizable names, so potentially the true cost of production is a very overpriced contract for digital services. The article cites “expensive costumes and elaborate sets” as a cost driver, I guess we will have to wait and see, but that seems like a cover.

To quote Arrested Development, “It’s one banana, Michael! What could it cost, $10?”

Nonetheless, exciting to see an updated and hopefully more approachable journey into Middle Earth. I love LOTR, but cannot get my family excited to hunker down for a 3+ hour movie compared to watching 1hr chunks of tv series.

Totally OT, but this kind of stuff drives me up the wall:

"Now, Deadline confirms that the first season of the show will cost $465 million to produce.

For comparison’s sake, Peter Jackson’s whole Lord of the Rings trilogy cost $281 million to make. For something more recent, Game of Thrones was spending around $100 million per season after it really blew up — this would be around season 6 — and spent far less in its early days."

The issue is that there is no inflation adjustment. $281M was different in the 2000s than it is now.

In fact, per https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $281M in Jan 2004 (the last LoTR movie was released in Dec 2003) is $443M in May 2022 dollars.

Still eye popping numbers, but the costs for the series and the moves are no longer hundreds of millions of dollars apart.

Does anyone else find it ironic and kind of sad that Amazon, of all companies, has taken over a story about the evils of greed and lust for power, and which idolizes the simple, pastoral lifestyle above all else?

There are few places less Shire-like than an Amazon warehouse.

Good God can someone come up with a unique or at least mildly novel idea? I'm getting sick of seeing remakes and spinoffs of classic franchises or series that absolutely disrespect the originals by pumping out some garbage ass show that will somehow last longer than a season.

Chernobyl 2

>Chernobyl 2: Nuclear Boogaloo

FTFY

Chernobyl: Fukushima

I’m not so sure the LOTR series is ideal for expansion.

It feels like Peter Jackson has already tackled all the really interesting parts of the LOTR world.

Tolkien created a lot of content, an entire fantasy universe. With good storytelling there's a lot more to tell.

If Star Wars, which let's be frank here, is a 2 bit creation compared to Tolkien's works, managed to become a multi billion dollar franchise, then the LotR world should be able to do the same, if it's managed wisely.

But then Star Wars was envisaged as a series of films and the sequels and prequels are part of a directly related story with overlapping characters and pacing, with the original creators around to give it their blessing and the occasional bit of creative input. Fans can overlook a lot of shoddiness to see C3PO again or how Darth became Darth. The forging of rings or founding of Rivendell, not so much, and I think the story of how Gollum became Gollum is off limits to the series too.

The Amazon LOTR proposal is basically some new fantasy stories set in a different millennium from the LOTR world which loosely tie in with some chronologies Tolkien wrote as lore rather than narrative, with a license which prevents them from reinterpreting events from the LOTR/Hobbit books from a Tolkien Estate that isn't exactly keen on giving the series canonical status. Instead of hobbits from the Shire and kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor under threat - all places that don't exist, never mind the characters - we've got a blank slate fantasy civilisations called Numenor and Eregion (which will resemble LOTR in the same way most high fantasy civilisations tend to) and a pretty loose narrative arc which implies the bad guy eventually destroying them.

The output might be very good stories in their own right, or it might be bland as hell, but the hardcore Tolkien fanbase is going to be hard to please. Create a series of episodes purporting to show the full history of the Second Age and it'll be [probably correctly] accused of being disjointed and completely lacking Tolkien's epic storytelling skill; create a compelling quest narrative involving dwarves and hobbits and it'll be accused of discarding Tolkien's actual histories in favour of a cheap knockoff of his plot structure.

I mean, a licensee could probably randomly choose a third rate LOTR fanfic plot and sell millions of tickets to watch it, but that doesn't necessary mean its a good idea from a creative standpoint.

Them not doing Silmarillion is odd....

I mean that had some very textual readings that would have been easily loved by the woke crowd. (The Beren storyline, overall strength of female heroes during the narrative)

Assume the Tolkien Estate wanted more money for those rights...

This over 5 hours long review of all the Lord of the Rings video games ever made should give a clear indication of how much this universe has to offer:

https://youtu.be/poMnJKLGYo0

It also clearly shows how all the cash grab attempts generally fail and how those that get the freedom to create something with passion usually end up successful. So yeah...

> It feels like Peter Jackson has already tackled all the really interesting parts of the LOTR world.

looks sideways to The Silmarillion

looks sideways to The Children of Húrin

looks sideways to The Fall of Gondolin

Looks sideways to the licensing agreement that covers none of that material

Yeah, This is a valid criticism of Star Wars, which is now stuck parading the same 10 characters around forever, but not LOTR.

You can do interesting stories in any setting. LOTR is just a famous brand which means the show is going to be easier to market. I mean if you think about it the LOTR lore is mostly a somewhat christianised version of Norse mythology. It leaves a lot of room especially if you don’t feel too bound to the original texts which are frankly uneven.

> You can do interesting stories in any setting.

While it may be possible, money grubbing capitalist pig scum like Disney seem completely incapable of it, so I doubt this will end well. Capitalists destroy everything because instead of focusing on stakeholders they focus on profit above all else.

Silmarillion has some very interesting stories, though. Much more potential than in Hobbit, really.

Potential can be squandered though.

As much as I would like to see live action Silmarillion, it would probably be the most expensive tv show of all time. Many epic scenes can't possibly be shot for real so the show would require odious amounts of CGI. Heck at this point, hire a studio that makes video game trailers and turn the whole thing into a 50+ hours CGI tv show.

Silmarillion as done by Blur Studios would be incredible.

Yep, imagine the Valar and Melkor raising and leveling mountains on screen (the very early periods of Arda). Brrrr, that would be epic.

I agree on the Silmarillion although every time I reread it I grind my teeth about how stupid the elves were to give in to some empty envy towards other elves when they literally had ZERO problems in their lives.

Hits too close to home and it hurts, I guess. Because I've seen the same many times -- people literally seeking for problems because their lives are so careless and leisurely.

The better question is whether it's possible to create a LotR representation with even a shred of the original's soul. Chris Tolkien hated the Jackson trilogy, and then see how much further modern market demands pushed The Hobbit's execution. I don't want to see what another ten years of compromises and pandering will do to the product.

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.

Didn't his father sell off the film rights for £10,000 - no wonder he is slightly grumpy about any movies!

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 they cut things which just would never have even worked on screen, and in general I don't think a deeply ponderous and weighty mood would have really been received that well. That said, some of the changes they made (e.g. to Denethor) were just gratuitous.

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.

What was the original army of the dead like? It always seemed like the weakest point of all the films and certainly the most glaring plot hole of why didn’t they keep using them.

In the original the army of the dead was used to capture the ships, and grab the army under a Prince in southern Gondor, (I think it was Imiril) and bring his army up from Osgiliath, to surround the armies of darkness on 3 sides, who then broke and ran.

Were they a tide of untouchable murder ghosts though? Or were they more of a conventional zombie force that could be killed?

They cannot be killed but their aim is to abandon Earth, and they only need Aragorn to liberate them after they have fulfilled their oath. Not that Aragorn has true power over them. He has only the power to set them free, and they obey because that is the way to freedom.

More or less as in the film BUT they were eager to leave the Earth, and they only needed to heed their oath. They do so in a side battle (near Osgiliath IIRC) and, immediately, Aragorn sets them free.

But they are not “an army at the ser ice of Aragorn”. They just want to be liberated and to do so, they fulfill the promise they broke. They are not obligated to more (and Aragorn has no power to keep them “here”), much less to make them obey him.

That's what I think, they are not accurate to the books, or book in The Hobbit's case, but they are good films and I love watching them.

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.

Exactly my opinion as well. What worries me is that we saw what ten years of market shift did between LotR and The Hobbit. Now it's been another ten years of it. Instead of showing bad people tearing down trees to fuel industry, we're going to have some good character give a five minute long speech about it. There is going to be a romance plot between an orc and a non-orc. There is going to be a female orc and she is going to be a strong independent woman. There is going to be a ruler who is as bad Denethor but they're going to make a strong point about him also being a racist.

Oh gods no I ... I can see this happening, it's just too plausible.

Why wait, when you can watch this Gandalf^W Dumbledore prequel?

https://decider.com/2022/05/30/fantastic-beasts-the-secrets-...

(warning: Lots of spoilers in there...)

At the end of the day stories reflect our society and LoTR is just another story.

All of the classic stories we tell kids have evolved over time and are no longer true to their original source material. We take the thing we need, ignore the things we don't need, and add what's missing from our modern eyes.

If you go back to the source material for things like Snow White, Pinocchio and trace them through the ages you'll see that they have constantly changed and adjusted.

I think there's a difference between tuning a story and misappropriating it as a vehicle for your personal goals. This can be done well by giving us more background on what was a minor character or altering dialogue to give a different perspective of events. It can be done badly, such as by introducing us to Kímli, the lesbian dwarf queen with a mithril wheelchair.

> It feels like Peter Jackson has already tackled all the really interesting parts of the LOTR world.

I would say Hobbit is about the least suited part of the universe for adoption. There are far better stories.

Just wait until the magic moment where Sauron tells Frodo that he's his father.

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?

I think they mean having to hit a certain quota of ethnicities of people. LOTR has been very vocal about how “diverse and inclusive” this production is.

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

Or a real diverse series based on a diverse book series which never spent a dime on reminding everyone how diverse they are. Eg The Expanse.

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

There’s talent out there beyond celebrities and movie stars.

But that talent comes cheaper, where is this $400MM going?

Hopefully: big sets, lots of extras, on-location shooting.

Probably also some internal accounting bullshit like "the Amazon home page is worth $100M as an ad placement spot".

There’s great talent, but they don’t command large fees. So GP’s question stands.

They aren’t spending money on actors and writers, so where is the money going? That’s a lot of spirit gum.

> 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.

Yeah, and look at Stranger Things, it started with a 6M per episode budget and now (due to massive success and fame the actors got their share) is at 30M per episode. That means season 1 was 48M and now season 4 is at 240M.

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.

> 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.

I really don't get this sentiment. AWS was a loss making unit once much like any other innovative idea. Amazon funds 1000s of different ideas with the intention that few will work. If government would break up companies like this, there would be no interest in pursuing ideas by big companies and no funding for stuff which has any R and D cost.

I get where you're coming from, but it doesn't hold water when you reach the scale of a company like Amazon, for the time periods we're talking about.

The entire retail market is being undercut by Amazon Retail. Competition is being reduced to fewer and fewer competitors- which is bad for the consumer in the long run. All the while, Amazon retail can afford to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year, over and over again, because AWS makes up the difference. They can afford to build hundreds of high tech warehouses to reduce their costs further, all from the income from AWS.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I don't think it's okay that things are operating this way.

(And lets not even get into the abuse of customers and merchants on their retail marketplace, which frankly to me are enough that the government should have intervened long ago.)

It holds specially for company like Amazon. Do you know how many business Amazon is running on loss? AFAIK they are very liberal in spending in R and D or with long term motive. AWS was once such a project. Who would have though that companies are ready to spend 5x if you add extra services alongside the server.

Also, AFAIK Amazon shopping site is not in loss in US. Your suggestion could have made sense if Amazon is using AWS money to strengthen the monopoly, but Amazon shopping is a profitable business, in part due to advertisement.

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.

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.

>Amazon cancels Lord of the Rings MMO video game

This stood out to me, let's just say the MMO came out as well. Then the entire thing looks like a long-term investment to reinvigorate the franchise.

I actually really liked the WB Game's RPGs

I'm sure people find this offensive and offtopic, but As much as I'm a LOTR fan, I really can't wrap my head around why we spend so much money on creating a fiction series while millions of people are at risk of death from hunger, thirst, and climate change.

With 465$M, so many people could be saved. :(

The Wheel of Time series was of such middling quality that I'm more skeptical of this than ever. Not that a Silmarillion tv show really has much appeal to me anyway.

I hope it'll be better than The Wheel of Time, not that it takes much...

It's going to flop due to perceived wokeness and pandering with changes to source material intent and vision

Media productions are daughters of their time. We currently have a situation where the elite in Hollywood are desperate to bring diversity and blackwashing into the stories. When a new LOTR series is shot in 50 years from now, this will no longer be an issue.

As a fantasy series, it seems the ethnicities of the actors are quite irrelevant. I can understand that it can be a bit odd in historical dramas, but male actors used to play the female roles in plays. It seems pretty secondary unless the plot is explicitly about race. And historical accuracy, even in historical dramas is usually tenuous at best anyway.

I’d suggest that when you say “blackwashing” people are going to take that as a signal that you have some pretty toxic politics.

I think it’s an opportunity to explain how elves and dwarves ended up with different skin colors and whatnot. It’s a good opportunity for world building.

In the Hobbit movies there were some black elves and they didn’t describe anything about them. Just that there were some Black Forest elves mixed in with all the other elves.

I guess it slightly distracted where every minor detail had some back story and history, but I don’t think detracted from the story. I don’t think leaving out these details was in the top 100 flaws of the Hobbit movie.

As someone really into Tolkien, I’d rather see them expand or adapt the lore than just swap out details. It’s not that it’s the end of the world, but it’s dangerous to change details from someone else’s work because I never know what was the actual important piece. I suppose I could change Michaelangelo’s David’s sex but it would be hard to recreate it with the same qualia as Muchaelangelo as I’m not him. It’s not the sex of the sculpture that’s important, it’s my implementation. I’m sure Michaelangelo would have e carved an amazing woman, or African, or Asian, or any background. But few are Michaelangelo.

An example of this that I think went kind of well is the Kevin Kostner Robin Hood movie where they cast Morgan Freeman and gave him a back story of being a Moor from the crusades who returned to England. I think this worked out better than if they had just randomly changed a Robin Hood character ‘a race.

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

It may not happen with this series, because too many will probably still watch it even if it’s terrible, but it’s bound to happen for some franchise at some point, and maybe things will get interesting then.

Last interesting sci-fi show I watched was The Expanse, it was on Prime. One may hope.

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.

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

>I wish they or someone else serializes Dune

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/

That (and the follow-on) weren't too bad. Much better than Lynch's treatment.

I must say, though, that I'm looking forward to part 2 of Villeneuve's Dune.

Haven't had the time to watch it. Working my way through the book.

It's pretty much impossible to adequately represent the books as a movie, and even a series can't really do the books justice.

The new movie does a fairly decent job of translating the books to live action.

The biggest disappointment, for me, in all of the treatments (including the movie), is the way the Fremen are represented.

I'm a bit spoiled, as I grew up in Africa, and was familiar with tribes like the Touareg, so I know what real desert-dwellers look like. I'm pretty sure that Herbert wanted them to look like that. Hard to represent, with city-dweller, millionaire actors.

Bedouin tribespeople look like dry twigs. Not much soft or fat. It would take serious self-denial to adequately represent.

Willem Dafoe would probably be able to represent Stilgar (in my mind). He'd have to go on a diet, and get a tan, though.

The miniseries and especially Children of Dune are so much better that the recent movie.

I find it's a tradeoff.

The new movie represents some of the visuals and environment better (in my mind), but skimps on the story.

I feel that Baron Harkonnen is better, in the movie. He was almost comedic, in the series.

Charlotte Rampling would not have been my choice for the Bene Gesserit mother, but I think she actually works.

I'm not too happy with any of the other casting choices, except Gurney Halleck, but, for some strange reason, they never consulted me.

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 are nothing but 'tell'. It is why a lot of Steven King books fall flat in the movies. That can be tough. As that can get rather dull. As you look at what the chars are seeing but you are missing out on their commentary. They tried that in the 84 dune and it just came out awkward.

> 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.

Hopefully it doesn't turn into the dreck that the Wheel of Time series has turned out to be. And no, I'm not referring to the garbage "anti-woke" drivel that racists have peddled about the show. I'm simply referring to the fact that the series is so far removed from the actual story that claiming the series is "based on" the books is even a stretch. It's basically a completely different story that uses the same character names and some terminology.

The last hurrah for web money profligacy maybe. Investors aren't going to be too happy to see so much money spent without a commensurately large return in this economic climate.

This will make last 2 seasons of GoT seem like War and Peace. That trailer.. Read books probably 5-6 times, read Silmarillion(!), watched the movies probably 10 times, even watched Hobbit twice(that was painful). Only tattoos I have are in Cirth.. I could have easily dumped thousands of bucks on merchandise and other crap together with my kids over the years if it looked even remotely decent.

I am not subscribing to prime or watching this garbage.

Claiming that this is garbage based on a single trailer seems a little premature.

That seems like an odd take. The purpose of a trailer is for the production to make their best argument to the audience about why they should see this show. If a trailer looks good, people get hyped for the show or movie and buy tickets when the time comes. If the trailers looks like crap, most people won't watch the show or movie. The whole purpose of a trailer is for people to judge whether or not to invest more of their time and money in that production.

There simply isn't enough time for people to watch everything, there is way too much media for that. And this LOTR show is going to be much longer than a typical movie, because it's a TV show. I expect 8 hours at minimum, assuming each of the 8 episodes is an hour. Expecting people to watch it before judging whether it's worth their time doesn't make any sense. Which is why trailers are made...

This budget feels very out of whack with what we have seen of the production. No big names either in front of or behind the camera. All the recognizable credits are at the producer level, and some of those are of dubious reputation. I don't want to disparage unknown actors and crew members, but it seems awfully risky to expect them to carry this show without any veterans to rally around. I guess the logic Amazon is using is that LotR's brand is so strong it doesn't need star power, or experience, or anything else to carry it besides apparently a huge pile of money. But this seems like a really, really bold direction for a project when Amazon is still very new to producing media and they have yet to produce a single unqualified hit.

Let's hope they won't turn it into a diversity thing checking all the boxes and loosing the plot

I think that ship already sailed.

Lol, the "diversity thing" is the star of the show here as evidenced by both the media they (creators) have put out (images, etc) + by their own admission.

Whole thing is The Message and nothing more

I would love for this to be good, but I'm afraid it's going to follow in the footsteps of "The Shannara Chronicles". I read every single one of the "Shannara" books as well as the sub-series (Word & Void, etc.) but I watched 2 episodes of Chronicles and couldn't stand it.

I don't know if it's because I had a whole look and feel for the characters in my mind's eye and the show didn't reflect that. Or maybe it was because they told a story that was similar to the books but not quite the same. Or maybe it was bad CGI and writing. Whatever it was, the show just didn't sit right with me. This LOTR series feels very similar.

That percentage based rebate incentivizes accounting shenanigans to make it look as expensive as possible, who knows how many salaries included in that number Amazon was paying anyway, no matter if they would have produced that show or not.

I doubt anything interesting will came out from that expensive series. They're doing it for the money, not for the product. And that as always be a clear indicator of a low quality product.

Biggest worry:

I have massive doubts that this show would bring in profits similar to Avengers: End Game. Because that's what it'll take.

Even if this is a smashing success by streaming standards, Season 2 will be ridiculously toned down to keep the costs down to like 50MM. People will instantly say "quality dropped significantly" and then it'll collapse. Feels like this will go the way of Marco Polo which was an amazing show, destroyed by Netflix's lack of desire to spend any money.

> New Zealand, where the show is shooting

I think they’ve switched to England and Wales haven’t they? Which is probably closer to the author’s inspirations (Tolkien never set foot in New Zealand.)

> Which is probably closer to the author’s inspirations (Tolkien never set foot in New Zealand.)

Yes. A youthful walking holiday in the Alps was also a source of inspiration.

It’s going to be interesting how badly this will fail _if_ they are focused on making an international success that also can be viewed in China…

Could we just get a few more seasons of the Expanse. Or Dune. C'mon people we've done this one already.

Star Wars Episode 3 was made off of 115 million to put things in perspective. Even adjusted for inflation.....

Production costs have gone up a lot in New Zealand after Peter Jackson put them on the map. Also, if the government is covering 25% of the costs it creates an intended incentive to spend more.

People spend a lot on content because successful content is worth it. I hope this is good.

Not to be That Guy, but crikey - think of all the good that could be done in the world for half a billion dollars.

Cue my usual thought about how the likes of Apple could make/break Fusion Energy (prove/disprove viability) for a small percentage of their bank balance.

well at least i don't need to feel so guilty about all those amazon returns.

$465m was a pretty standard price tag for a single Ferrari/Red Bull/Merc F1 season pre-covid, and I think the merch opportunities and addressable market are probably pretty comparable

Even though the MMO got cancelled, I hope they'll make Battle for Middle Earth 3. Honestly, BFME 2 was the shit.

Doubt it though, rts hasn't been the rage for a looooong time.

It's basically guaranteed, that even if it's bad, it will be a huge hit.

The material/fanbase is just to energetic. They and kids, at minimum, will watch it.

It can't be worse than wheel of time ... or can it?

From reading the article, $200M was for the rights alone, and NZ is rebating 25% so it comes out to more like 150M net on production of the actual show.

No, the NZ rebate is based on production costs, which doesn't count funds spent on purchasing the rights to a project.

Sounds to me like it's rather $665M in total, with a rebate of $116M.

This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning:

1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical;

2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode.

Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits.

3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley);

4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't.

5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good.

6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic.

If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late).

Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project.

[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-ri...

> There's nothing wrong with elevating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition.

That pepper is doubtlessly good for marketing, but I think it's bad for the art. With some exceptions, every time a famous celebrity is in a movie, it breaks immersion for me. I think fame makes an actor intrinsically worse at their job, even when their acting skill is the reason for their fame.

Except for Gary Oldman of course.

I don't think Jackson understood LOTR--I agree with Christopher Tolkein's criticism of the movies, although I do personally enjoy them, and I don't think you're "wrong" for liking them. I'll explain my take:

As I am sure you are aware, Tolkein was a classic British academic, like James Herriot was in veterinary medicine. He had a fierce and deep fondness for England and all of the colonizers that contributed to the English identity and and nation via art, migration, and war, primarily focusing on the pagans, the Norse, the Danes, and the Germans (the "Saxon" in Anglo-Saxon is from areas very close to Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands). If you ever read James Herriot's memoirs, you'll hear a lot of similar admiration for the distinct English sub-cultures and the unique dialects, practices, personalities, and looks they had based on their conquering ancestors and their subsequent evolution.

As C. Tolkein complained, Jackson turned the IP into an action-spectacle that glorified war and battle. This doesn't initially make sense as a criticism, given that the novels center around a a massive war, but more investigation clears the matter up. LOTR was not military-forward because Tolkein loved war and action, but because he understood that the English identity was first and foremost a martial creation by the competition of unique cultures with long traditions of mythology and fairy tales, and it would be foolish to examine and display those cultures without the addition of warfare. A massive, ongoing war was the most convenient and English way to present his created cultures and languages, and he took the concept of honor and fealty between sub-nations very seriously. The England of Tolkein's youth educated their children that way, too; the history of England was taught to children as a series of battles that bookended reigns by different nobles. (This is supported by the childhood school memories of other famous English authors like Orwell and Dahl.)

So LOTR is actually a sort of mythical folk ethnography of northwestern Europe, with a primary focus on a mythical England as its center. It is not a clean 1:1 map (you can't just say "Dwarves = Germans"), but there are extremely obvious parallels. Hobbits are like English country folk, Elves are Scandinavian roving royalty, the Rohan horsemen are like mixtures of Steppe raiders and northern Scots.

A good example of how Jackson failed to understand Tolkein's creation was through his treatment of the hobbits. In the novels, the hobbits are crafty, industrious folk, who have the same eccentricities as the intelligent and cultured (but also petty and simple-minded) denizens of Tolkein's English country. The hobbits in the text are an ancient culture who perform long feats of academic genealogy, farm, distill, and are well-read and "mature" as we might compare them to modern humans--Tolkein's joke is that despite acting as landholding businessmen, scholars, and tradesmen, the main foursome are considered immature as compared to other hobbits.

Jackson, on the other hand, treats them primarily as drunken, silly teenaged sideshow halflings. His portrayal is very funny and I am fond of it, but he completely misses the gravitas of the Shire as he lays it out in the Fellowship of the Ring. The novel-hobbits are a functioning proto-industrial agricultural civilization with their own myths, narratives, political factions, and warfare (just like the real-life residents of the English countryside), but the movie-hobbits are funny hillbillies with pretty architecture, with some exceptions like Bilbo.

This theme of "complex martial culture reduced to laughs and action scenes" is common through all three movies, and it stretches through all of the cultures that Jackson portrayed. I think the most egregious casualty is in Return of the King, when the noble chivalry, restrained capacity for violence, and scholarship of Faramir is replaced with a silly "temptation of an inferior man" plotline, which to me shows that Jackson lacked the ability to take Tolkein's ideas really seriously. If you don't believe me, watch the Faramir scenes in the movie, and then go back in the book and read them. Novel-Faramir is a paragon of virtue, an intelligent, shrewd, and principled man who refuses to compromise his principles for the glory of Gondor, but also remains loyal to his father, as would be expected of a son of means and nobility in a battle-tested patriarchal culture.

That said, I do enjoy the movies and I don't think you're wrong for liking them. Jackson did an excellent job with the art, music, geography, character relations, military scenes, heroism, and pacing. I simply don't think he understood the underlying soul of the novels.

Considering how awful the Hobbit movies were I can't see how this could be worse.

In any case, after the horror that was Wheel of Time, I'm not watching any Amazon fantasy shows unless they get glowing reviews (from real critics, not tech news commentators).

The Severance budget was over $300 million and that shot in NYC so $350 in NZ after rebate makes sense. I had heard they were spending $1 billion on the new LOTR, maybe that’s including rights and marketing

I'm going to need a citation on that. Sources that I read from a quick web search indicate that Apple is spending an average of $10 million per episode on its shows. How "Severance" could cost $300 million, when it takes place almost entirely on an indoor office set, defies plausibility.

You are right I checked my sources and I was quite mistaken. $100 million budget is it what it landed at.

Old article...needs [2021] in title

Spending? Wasting

ouch, that's gonna hurt

It will flop.

Man, half a billion dollars on an entertainment product - that money could be poured into something useful, like space.

We shouldn’t be spending money on earthly delights until we’ve fixed all the problems in space. What practical applications have hobbits given us, anyway?

> What practical applications have hobbits given us

second breakfast, for one

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