Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convinced New Line to take a big risk on it. Maybe they should have changed nothing, but I think that's unreasonable. It's a different medium, where storytelling and pacing are just different, and also we live in reality, and people are looking for returns on their investment.

The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors.

The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.

> At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made.

The problem, if you will, with a great but imperfect work of art is that no one else will attempt the same work again. Because it has already been done and it's hard to top a smashing success.

If it had been a bad LotR movie, one would be able to hope, probably reasonably, that a good one might eventually be made. It would be a dissatisfying situation, just like that 1978 film. But the 2000s LoTR films were, indeed, quite good. And so they will likely be the final word.

I'm not sure that's really true. Take, for example, the Harry Potter movies. They were great, but imperfect, and were really well received. But they are still being readapted into a TV series.

There’s no way it will be left alone; I don’t think you need to worry about any “final words” from Hollywood. They’re already moving on another large LotR project that might actually just be the main story remade already.

It seems pretty inevitable that there will eventually be a TV series style live action LOTR— in theory that should give the breathing room necessary for the story to unfold over 30-50 hours rather than 8-9.

> It seems pretty inevitable that there will eventually be a TV series style live action LOTR— in theory that should give the breathing room necessary for the story to unfold over 30-50 hours rather than 8-9.

Great, so it will for LotR the same as what was done in the films for The Hobbit.

If you are doing LotR in more than double the runtime of the LotR extended editions (which are 11h36m), I am…beyond skeptical.

Given how TV series are lately written and how latests adaptations of loved books went, I really really hope they wont make one for LOTR too.

Yes, in theory longer format should have more space to breath. In practice, we will get dialogs that will make you cringe, removal of everything that is not straightforward action, compression of everything nuanced into a single talking point and massive change in characters and plots.

I think it really could depend. Yes, there's a strong possibility that you get excessive cutaways to appendix content and a lot of invented side-drama to pad it out, but it's also conceivable that a longer take could include much more of the original dialogue. As a very silly and trite example, take Eowyn's iconic "I am no man" line from ROTK. In the book, that line is an entire speech, and it's fabulous:

> “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”

The Mary Sue did a great long-form piece on how unfortunate it was that Eowyn's character wasn't managed better: https://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/

In any case, this is just one small example, but it's easy to imagine that with a longer treatment of Bilbo's birthday party, the hobbits might have been able to be more fleshed out as well, and less of just dumb comic relief. That said, even the 1981 BBC radio play that's considered by many purists to be the gold standard as far as LOTR dramatizations is only about 13h, so perhaps I'm being pretty optimistic to imagine that doubling that runtime could go anywhere good.

Hollywood recently came up with something called a "reboot". It's where they take a movie that was successful in the past, and remake it with modern actors.

Like that The Magnificent Seven (1960) reboot of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) ?

I think that's been going on for a while now:

https://reelrundown.com/film-industry/The-First-10-Musical-S...

The first movie adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was quite good, nonetheless they're already working on a 3rd.

Which is interesting because the first one was quite different from the book, the second one tried to stay closer, and both have their points.

I think a remake of the LotR will happen some day, but not for quite awhile (a re-animation of the CG may happen first) - mainly because it was already filmed in high-def and on "modern" equipment.

If it does get made again, it's likely to be in a TV mini-series format, perhaps less on sets and more on dialogue/acting.

> If it does get made again, it’s likely to be in a TV mini-series format, perhaps less on sets and more on dialogue/acting.

A limited series of 10 1-hour episodes will still be shorter than the extended editions of the film trilogy in total runtime.

Ben Hur has been made 4 times. The first one had some good moments, the second was great, the third and fourth were "what was the point".

Peter Jackson got NLC to give him HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to film the second and third movies back to back. That was an amazing feat.

Cameron has now surpassed that number, almost twenty years later. But for the time that was crazy.

He filmed all three together, not the second two. That makes it even more insane, especially at the time when no one had done this and fantasy movies were far out of vogue.

My biggest issues were the total butchering of the timeline Jackson made to move make the Battle of Helm's deep happen. The whole trek from Meduseld, the warg attack, Aragorn's near-death, and the march of Saruman's orcs all happened in the same day and night, I can even ignore the barrenness of the Pellenor Fields (those should all be farmland!) and even dropping the Scouring Of The Shire. Other than those flaws, I thought the movies were pretty good.

In one of the earliest screenplays, Frodo and Galadriel have sex. And Gandalf basically waterboards Gimli into revealing the password to Moria. It's a wild take on the material.

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