LOTR Campout Begins

Rocknalle writes: "As reported on The One Ring queues have have already started lining up for The Fellowship Of The Ring. Team GladBlad (having placed themselves nr. 1-4 in the queue), are reporting live from the event via notebooks and and cellular networking (9.6 Kbps rules! :-). Visit GladBlad and see what happens when geeks goes outside." The other LOTR news I know of is a description of the journalistic teaser trailer. Salon seems to have liked what they saw.

Comments

Re:Erm...

[DagSverre]

They might be opening for ticket pre-sales on monday though. I bought my Star Wars ep I ticket two months in advance for instance...

Re:Echos of Ep1

[OblongPlatypus]

Here in Norway, they start selling tickets to these "big" movies a month or two in advance, and they usually play up to the whole queuing deal in various ways. During the last night of the Ep1 queue, they were showing Ep4-6 on a big screen outside the theatre, held a costume competition, etc. The first screening on the opening day is usually scheduled at 00:01. Basically, it's made into a big deal by the theatres.

Although I used the world "usually", so far Ep1 is actually the only movie in which the actual queuing process has been hyped in this way. The next will be LOTR, and I'm sure LOTR2&3 and SW2&3 will be handled similarly. Possibly Matrix2&3 as well, I'm not sure if Matrix has had time to acquire enough of a cult status yet though. The LOTR ticket sale starts on November 5th. It's cold outside already, it'll be freezing by then - at least the Ep1 release was in the summer :)

I also used "theatre", singular, in the first paragraph. That's because the ticket sale was limited to only one theatre in the entire country. Despite that, when I showed up at around midnight on the last night before the ticket sale started, there weren't more than about two hundred people in line before me; I got excellent tickets to the 6am screening on the opening day.

The conclusion would be that out of the almost 5 million people in my country, only about 200 cared enough about Ep1 to queue up more than 8 hours in advance, despite massive hyping by the theatres. Anyone know the statistics for the states? And is there any queue-specific hyping of the sort I described above going on over there?

Big clarification

[OblongPlatypus]

Although the movie opens on December 19th, these people are not lining up for a two-month wait. The ticket pre-sale starts next Tuesday, so it's more like 4 or 5 days.