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

Echos of Ep1

[Telek]

I remember all that hype about episode 1 for star wars and people lining up for months in advance.

Was it worth it?

I doubt it. I walked up to my local AMC the night before and bought 12 tickets without problem for a show around 8pm on the opening day. As much as I am for camping, I think that this is a little ... too extreme, no?

Did anyone out there actually line up far in advance for Ep1?

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?

Re:What a bunch of losers

[TroyFoley]

And when people keep telling me that American stupidity runs rampant, I point to John Q. Condescend here who blames American culture for Danish fans obsessing over a New Zealand produced movie based on a book written by an Englishman.

This Salon guy's scaring me

[stevens]

What does it mean that the action scenes were described thusly:

• "distinctive vision" — "distinctive" is often used as a euphemism for "screwy."
• "edited frenetically in the modern style" — frenetic? modern? I hope this isn't describing the string of 1/10 sec cuts that films like Tomb Raider called an action sequence.
• "such jittery vision" — This is worrisome. I'd rather not see LOTR with "jittery" anything.

I've loved the trailers so far, and even booked a private matinee screening for myself and my programming team in advance, so you know I'm a booster of this film. But these descriptions make me wonder what the Salon writer was trying to get across.

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.

jeez

[zerocool^]

Freakin' campers. Now you can't even go to the movies. They're everywhere.

jeez, just used to be that you couldn't get to the quad damage.

~z

People should try as hard to stop the SSSCA

[ajm]

If only people would put one tenth as much effort into trying to stop bad laws such as the SSSCA as they put into waiting to suck at the corporate teat of the company that pays for those laws we might not be in such a bad state. LOTR will probably be a good movie, but it's not as important as having Disney/Hollywood control your digital life. Wake Up.