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RotK Delayed Until May 2004
An anonymous reader writes "New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, will be held for domestic release until Wednesday, May 12, 2004. The effects work on this third and final film of the trilogy will surpass its predecessors in scope and intensity, and the producers as well as director Peter Jackson feel that the extra time will cement the film's status as the king of fantasy films and the crowning jewel of New Line's massive effort to bring J.R.R. Tolkien's epic to the screen."
Dry your tears this is a hoax. Its the Matrix 2 that is being pushed back to May 2004.
Peter Jackson feel that the extra time will cement the film's status...
plus it will allow him extra time to work on 'King Kong vs. Godzilla II'
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
I thought April Fools jokes were supposed to stop at noon.
i can't wait till today is over :-\
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
And the reaction from the one ring web site is...
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
It took you 2 movies to get the logo done? I knew things were slow in middle earth, but this slow ? :)
April Fool!
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Who exactly are the fools... The ones who believe this or the ones who thought others would?
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
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Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
You may think it's ready to go but the W. Brothers want to rerender all the effects on linux boxes so people will think its cool.
Also, they can take the time to go back, re-read TTT and ROTK and correct all the plot problems they introduced in TTT.
When Faramir turned out to be "Boromir II" I nearly walked out of the theatre.
How did they get the first film so right and the second one so wrong? *pounds head against wall*
Tweet, tweet.
FINALLY
9 16 794d =4983 792d =5033 027d =5280 387d =5416 129d =5579 563
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After ALL my posts (and Total karma Whoring) LOTR HAS A LOGO!!!! THANK YOU!!
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
i have a feeling you will never have sex unless an exchange of currency is involved.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
You don't understand, unless you married like I am, ... no this aint another April Fool's joke, I am really married... but it is important this comes out in December. My birthday is December 18th, so I kinda get a free pass with my wife on picking a movie to see. If it is moved to May, I may be forced to divorce my wife and quit my job just to go see the last movie in the series!!!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
So... ROTK will be employing a Shock-n-Awe campaign?
Because if it was real there'd be like 2000 comments by now. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
The final stage of Leprosy.
Return of the King Kong?
... am I the only one who thought it seemed like a normal day at Slashdot?
"Programming is like sex - one mistake and you'll have to support it for the rest of your life."
How many good ST movies since Slashdot began?
hint: )
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I heard it was pushed back so Brooks could finish up the last volume in his rewrite of The Lord of the Rings. Details at:
http://www.locusmag.com/2002/News/News0401b.html
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
What is this evil bit that you speak of? I would like to read an article about it.
No. Sauron forged the one ring c. 1600, second age. It's kind of old.
There was nothing that I can recall in the original theatrical release of the Fellowship of the Ring that made me cringe (some of the material that in the Extended Release did, but that largely shows what a good job of editting was done in the Fellowship of Ring theatrical release). In comparison, there were several places in The Two Towers that made me cringe.
If you would watch the director's commentary footage on the LOTR DVD, you will find that Jackson and the two other writers have thoroughly read the Tolkein cannon for many, many years and, in fact, are very well versed in Middle Earth. What many of the people who are bitching about the movies don't realize is that a movie is a very, very different beast than a book, and making a movie requires a very different type of storytelling.
There are four main issues which require major changes when going from book to movie, and on issue specific to LOTR:
1) Time. Most people have a hard time sitting through a movie longer than three hours, which translates into about 180 script pages. On a movie the size of LOTR, a unit is lucky to shoot about half a script page a day, and, when the scene involves stunts, one minute of screen time can take three weeks of shooting time. A movie which translated all of the events in the books to the screen would be, literally, too long to film, and much too long to sit through. Cuts had to be made.
2) Story-telling paradigm: Books are (duh) a verbal medium, which means that, in many ways, novelists can be very lazy story tellers. Readers will forgive pages of interior monologue, long descriptive scenes, and characters who have relatively minor roles being given large chunks of attention for short periods of time - as the reader visualizes the story in his/her head, there are no time limits necessary. Film is a visual medium, which means that something has to be happening on the screen at all times in order to keep viewers interested, and, because of point 1) stories need to be streamlined so that the storytelling never bogs down. Tolkein's writing has a habit of taking grand digressions: at many points in the story Gandalf or Elrond or whomever will completely stop the action and retell some part of Middle Earth history, which, while it throws some light on the story, would absolutely completely kill the momentum in a movie. Because much of the intricacy of Middle Earth comes from these digressions, these had to be cut or reinterpreted.
3) Character is handled very differently in the two mediums. The first rule in any storytelling is to have characters the audience wants to watch and wants to care about. As already stated, books have the luxury of time and tropes not available to film: Gandalf can spend three pages telling us of the plight of the Dwarves and, from this, we can have a deeper understanding of their motives. In film you don't have this luxury, and you really have only three ways to develop a character: dialog, action and visual symbolism.
Many people have complained about the enlargement of Arwen's character and role in the movies. This was necessary because of the constraint of film. In the books Arwen doesn't actually have that much face time - much of the information and emotional impact of Arwen and Aragorn's relationship comes from Tolkein's historical digressions and knowledge of the past of Middle Earth, specifically the story of Beren and Luthien. There was absolutely no way to fit this information in the films while maintaining a watchable narrative flow: the action would have to be stopped to explain the plight of Elves versus men, the Doom of the Val
I am a believer of momentum and curves.