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."

Comments

Re:This had better not be a hoax!

[Ken@WearableTech]

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.

A LOGO AT LAST

[halo8]

FINALLY

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48383&cid=49 16 794
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49299&cid =4983 792
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49969&cid =5033 027
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53467&cid =5280 387
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=55587&cid =5416 129
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=58123&cid =5579 563

After ALL my posts (and Total karma Whoring) LOTR HAS A LOGO!!!! THANK YOU!!

Re:fuck fuck fuck ./

[joFFeman]

i have a feeling you will never have sex unless an exchange of currency is involved.

shock and awe

[cford]

The effects work on this third and final film of the trilogy will surpass its predecessors in scope and intensity

So... ROTK will be employing a Shock-n-Awe campaign?

With all of these fake stories...

[nekura]

... am I the only one who thought it seemed like a normal day at Slashdot?

Re:Hoax

[DJ Rubbie]

I *REFUSE* to believe this until it was posted more than the amount of times that darned RFC was posted here!

Re:They started screwing the plot up in Fellowship

[noewun]

The thing that especially bugs me is that if only Jackson had bothered to read any of Tolkien's writings outside of LOTR, I doubt that he would ever have butchered the story like he did--TTT, especially, isn't even in the spirit of Tolkien. How hard would it have been for him to read Tolkien's Of Fairy Stories which sets out what he believes are the important elements of a fairy story--elements that Jackson totally left out. Further, Jackson should have read some of Tolkien's writings on Anglo-Saxon literature, and should have read some Anglo-Saxon literature himself, so that he could have had an understanding of the type of literature that influenced Tolkien--if he had done that, he wouldn't have totally screwed up the people of Rohan, for one.

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