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Peter Jackson Hints At The Hobbit
Hellboy0101 writes "News.com.au is reporting that New Line Cinema is currently in talks to purchase the rights to the film adaptation of The Hobbit. There are apparently some difficulties with getting the go ahead from Tolkien's son Christopher, who is executor of the estate. When asked if New Line has approached him about the project, Jackson said he has not ruled it out, but not until after King Kong is done. 'New Line, which spent $US300million ($415 million) making the films, is already planning to continue its Rings success with an adaptation of Tolkien's novel The Hobbit.
More difficulties with the Tolkien estate were looming, said Jackson, who added that he would be keen to get involved after he finishes remaking King Kong in 2006. "New Line haven't actually talked to me about The Hobbit. I know there's difficulty about the rights, certainly if they want to talk to me about it I'd be keen," he said.'"
Learn from the mistakes of others and leave while you're on top! Besides, the animated version of The Hobbit is already a gem.
(Although if you must... you have my sword)
Like beating the Bishop?
I've read everything Tolkien many times over. While I didn't feel the Jackson movies were completely honest to the books, I can understand his explanation regarding pacing and whatnot as it applies to the visual medium.
I really enjoyed the first two of the Trilogy, and am very much looking forward to the third.
If Jackson wants to take on The Hobbit, I'd be very interested in seeing the resulting work.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
It seems really strange that The Hobbit, a story about a 3 foot tall theif, is considered a bigger event than the story of a 50 foot tall gorrilla.
I Guess size doesnt matter.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
The 50's called. They want their lingo back.
If he does this, he'll ruin a children's classic. LOTR was okay because they were for a wider audience. However, The Hobbit is more about imagination and every child will get a different interpretation. A film puts out one interpretation thus squashing imagination.
If they plan to do it, they better do it quick. The only (I believe) common character of the trilogy and the Hobbit is Gandalf. Ian McKellen isn't getting any younger.
I wonder if they can all get Ian Holme, Ian McKellen, Hugo Weaving and Andy Serkis to reprise their roles as Bilbo, Gandalf, Agent Elrond and Gollum. It would be cool if it were kept consistant with LOTR.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Do not let that guy with the prehensile uvula mangle the song The Road Goes Ever On like he did in the Rankin/Bass cartoon.
Now I wasn't clear from the summary, but are you saying there's some sort of difficulty with getting the rights from the estate? Or that he'll wait until after King Kong? I think you need to repeat it maybe 6-7 more times, just to be sure.
The only way it would work would be if it was deliberately filmed and marketed as a movie for young children.
Someone should tell Jackson that there's a whole lot you can do for a community besides put up a museum or a monument to what you did with their tax break, and it need not even be an eyesore like that statue he wants. How about building parks and playgrounds? Contributing to local health programs? Financial aid for economically depressed areas? Charities? Libraries? Help for schools?
These and a whole lot of others are ways to give back to the community in ways that really help. And they don't require the permission of the Tolkien estate either.
And the brethren went away edified.
I think the Hobbit, in a screenplay more true to the original book, will work better on film than LoTR, because it's a far shorter and more self-contained story that will translate to the big screeen more effectively. It's not as deep as LoTR, and will appeal to children. Because it has the potential to be more true to the books, the diehards will be happy, and new fans will also enjoy the simpler storyline.
Remember the animated version? It was really goood! I'd imagine that a live action version, using WETA's technology, could potentially be even better.
NO CARRIER
Chris Tolkien Gaurds his Father's properties like Smaug Dwarven gold and mithril. The attitudes seem similar too. He single handedly put Iron Crown into bankrupcy by jacking up the licencing costs a couple of years ago, even going so far as to have the printed works seized and destroyed even though they were printed and delivered while still under license. Of course this is all old news to any of my fellow Rolemaster / MERP players.
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
The fabled new character from Return of the King would be an ideal inclusion on this new Hobbit movie. 8)
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
But if you don't like it, no big deal.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Maybe they could get Leonard Nimoy to pen the songs for the Hobbit movie.
a ter6.html
He could use this as his resume for the job:
http://homepage.mac.com/evanbaumgardner/iMovieThe
Maybe he saw an advanced copy of Cat in the Hat and realized that people will destroy your loved one's creations to make really shitty stuff to get marketing gigs and product tie-ins.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
He single handedly put Iron Crown into bankrupcy by jacking up the licencing costs a couple of years ago
Iron Crown had a bit to do with it as well. I've talked with some of their authors, and to a one, they all blame ICE. The causes are numerous. Not focusing on new customers, issuing more regional background material than they did adventures, chasing the CCG fad while letting the RPG base deteriorate, etc. Tolkien Enterprises merely sunk an already sinking ship.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"Gandalf is not a man -- he is istari, an immortal Maya"
I didn't realize that wizards were from Mexico.
(...It's Maia.)
GL
threw the book down and ran out of the room shrieking like a little girl.
;)
As long as you shrieked in Quenya, you have nothing to be ashamed of.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Hitler's favorite movie was Metropolis.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
As I said, IMO he needs to pull his head from his ass.
My point being - not made very well I suppose - that in order to preserve the Tolkien legacy, things like films, museums and statues are a pretty good way.
I suppose you could argue that the profits from the movie, rather than spent on a museum should instead be spent on an endowment fund to benefit budding writers, or something.
The way I see it, Peter Jackson wants to preserve the effort put into the movie, thank New Zealand and promote Tolkiens' work.
AFAIC, standing in the way of his proposals is just plain silly.
But, if someone can point out the flaw(s) in my comment(s), I'd be happy to listen.
|>>?
You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall.
to the east there is the round green door.
you see:
the wooden chest.
Gandalf. Gandalf is carrying
a curious map.
Thorin.
Gandalf gives the curious map to you.
Thorin says " Hurry up "
> HIT THORIN
You attack Thorin.
But the effort is wasted. His defense is too strong.
Thorin attacks you.
With one well place blow Thorin cleaves your skull.
You are dead.
You have mastered 0.0% of this adventure.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Director Peter Jackson has been given $400 million US to remake the classic movie 'King Kong'. Excuse me, but this is insane...
The remake is being done on the strength of Mr. Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, which has sold (or will have sold in a few months time) over a billion dollars US in box office tickets after costing roughly $200 million to make and promote worldwide. Impressive, yes.
The Lord of the Rings is a dense multi-volume fully realized fantasy that has offered a rich complex story and hundreds of opportunities for using state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery to complement the plot into a strong, enveloping film fantasy.
But $400 million for King Kong?!? This is a flimsy plot about a giant ape who develops an obsession about a tiny blonde human woman pet. (Hollywood metaphor anyone?). Big monkey lives on a distant island; whites come; they capture him (somehow); they take him to New York, he flips out, smashes up some shti, climbs a building, and gets shot down. Duh, end of story.
How is this worth making into a $400 million movie? Or, rather, how is $400 million going to make a better movie than the original or the 1978 Jessica Lange remake? More computer graphic imagery? Of what? A big monkey smashing things in NYC? Didn't we see all that already in the remake of Godzilla? You remember that... The remake of Godzilla that cost $80 million and lost most of it because it was stupid and a completely unnecessary film? How are you going to cover a $400 million investment on a big monkey film?
I haven't seen the new Peter Jackson 'King Kong'. Hell, it hasn't even been made. In fact, the producers are wracking their pointed little heads trying to think of some new angle that will get 45 million people to pay $10 each just to cover the pre-production cost ($400 million film and $50 million in publicity).
But I just know it's a bomb. It's the 'Gigli' of Summer 2006. And it's going to take a studio or two down with it.
This isn't a troll, it's a tragedy...
Thank you kindly,
And they want their monkey back.
They saw what happened to Godzilla.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
In the audio commentary to the Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition DVD, Peter Jackson mentioned that he asked to keep the set of Bag End completely intact and in storage rather than having it torn down like most of the rest of the Lord of the Rings sets. New Line agreed, and Peter Jackson said that he has a complete, life-sized Bag End sitting in storage, ready to reassemble on the side of some hill.
I think he cracked a joke about building it somewhere and living in it, but hey, this way they can just break it out of storage and rebuild it and it will be the same set from Fellowship... instant continuity.
Not all experience, or learning, is positive, and some things can't be unlearned.
"Polanyi admits that focusing on particulars may improve our capacity to attend to the overall meaning. For instance, when we analyze poetry we might temporarily destroy our appreciation of it but it also makes for a much richer understanding once our attention is returned to the whole. It can be expected that one's understanding will be different from one's original understanding once attention has been shifted to the particulars and then back to the whole, in keeping with the idea that the relationship between the proximal and distal terms is dynamic and an active shaping of experience. The shifting of awareness may improve on previous understanding--as in the case with the poem, but, according to Polanyi, one's perspective can never be the same."
I believe that the contrast is also true, If you see a bad movie (or even a good one) it can forever alter how you view the book. Not always a bad thing, but usually somthing is lost after watching a bad film based on a good book.
Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers were made by some damned respectful people. Watching the Extended Edition DVDs, it's like these people were obsessed with being respectful of the source material, to a point.
Nothing is being "destroyed" here with Peter Jackson and WETA at the helm.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Oops, he's been dead for thirty years. Probably isn't going to be writing another book set in Middle Earth I guess.
The Hobbit was published in 1937. I think 66 years is plenty of time to recoop the his effort. I appreciate the intent of allowing copyright to pass on to one's heirs, but it's been 30 years since Tolkien died. Can't Christopher Tolkien create something of value himself to provide for himself? Heck, he's got to be doing well, and at 77 maybe it's time to retire and let the rest of the world enjoy a work you didn't actually create!
The Founder's Copyright still covers 99% of the potential value of copyrighted works and manages to do it without putting culture under chains.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
And you can not have me. On the behalf of the estate of the Axe, I refuse.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
..at a screening for reviewers (my mother is a reviewer) in NYC
No spoilers:
- Well another great chapter awaits!
- The battle scenes are stupendous, quite exhausting
- It is *long* (we didn't get an intermission)
- There are a couple of Monty Python-like lines which although not intentional drew some laughs
- The end is kind of soppy (well what did you expect)
- Towards the end it felt like Spielburg was on the job, squeezing out every last ounce of emotion
- Gandalf for president!
In 1976, the Saul Zaentz Co., doing business as Tolkien Enterprises, acquired rights to both The Hobbit and LotR. This agreement included the film rights. Tolkien Enterprises entered into an agreement with WB so that they could film the Rankin & Bass animated version of The Hobbit. Now comes the fun part: WB still has those rights, and they're sitting on them like a broody hen with only one egg.
New Line can't greenlight Peter -- they don't have the rights, and aren't likely to get them in the near future. Rumor has it that a few of the key brass over at the Frog Studio are a little cheesed off about the fact that a bunch of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, and other assorted mangy fairy-tale creatures have been collectively kicking the backside of a certain boy wizard at the box office for the past two Christmases running. Heh.
Now OTOH, the Tolkien Estate is being a pain in the butt about the idea of a movie museum in Wellington. And for that, Christopher Tolkien can rightly be accused of behaving like the dog in the manger.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
It is not insightful, it is flat out wrong on so many things wrong.
;)
Scroll to the top and reread the story.
Wait, don't both here it is:
"New Line, which spent $US300million ($415 million) making the films, is already planning to continue its Rings success with an adaptation of Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. "
That plainly says they spent the money on the LoTR series, not on the King Kong Remake. Further hints include the little know fact that "films" is plural, whereas "the King Kong remake" is singular.
Oh, and not to pick any nits or anything, but Universal is the one paying Jackson to do the remake of King Kong, and has budgeted 100 million to the project.
The only "insight" is that Simonetta didn't seem to read the original post. The tragedy is that s/he went off on poor defenseless strawman, and got a +5 insightful.
Just goes to show that put enough monkeys at a keyboard and let them bang away, eventually they'll mod anything and everything up to +5 insightful.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The Rings animated adaptation was doomed partly by the scope of the books, but your reaction's just colored by your having seen the live action first. My kids chose it to rent out last year too, and it had some things going for it, it genuinely did. I'd take the animated version of the hobbits' meeting with Strider over Peter Jackson's; it did a much better job of allowing him to be enigmatic, whereas the recent Fellowship telegraphed that scene badly. (I'm not so into Vigo in the role, he's way self-conscious.) In general the animated version has a lot less time for orcs screaming their lungs out to shell shock the audience, too, which ain't so bad to do without.
Not that they're perfect, but this isn't nearly as much of a train wreck as Attack of the Clones, or not in my book. The adapters did "get" the original stories, they understood the lines of each scene. If the Rings cartoon breaks down, it's mostly because of scope and their production values. And no, they didn't let the dwarves become a running short joke, either, or Legolas a rad surfer dude.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It is still important to Christians today to have a record of the fact that Christ was descended from David, since that was prophesied and we take those prophecies as proof of His deity.
When I was a boy my parents told me to skip all those genealogical passages. As a teenager, however, I decided that if they were in there they must be important, so I adopted a policy of making myself read them each time I come to those points in the Bible in my regular reading. (I don't go seek them out if I'm just thinking I feel like reading some of the Bible, but I don't skip them in my regular scheduled reading as I go through the Bible each year or so.)
What I found is that while for years it was almost impossible to even pay attention to them, gradually as I became more and more familiar with the rest of the Bible the genealogies took on meaning as a sort of review of what I've read. When I read through the genealogy of Christ, I have a capsule review of David, all the kings of Judah that came after him, the exile of Israel, the restoration under Zerubbabel, and other important events of the Old Testament. Now, I can see how if these events are unimportant to you then the genealogies would continue to be unimportant. :) But for those who like me believe the events in the Bible are God's way of teaching us how to live, those capsule reviews have begun to help me.
A few years back we had a special event at church where we were taught a series of hand-motion mnemonics to remember most of the events in the Old Testament. (Apparently there's a comparable set of mnemonics for the New Testament, but we haven't had the program for that.) At that point I had only recently started to notice that the genealogies were starting to have meaning to me, and I remember having the sudden epiphany: "Hey! The genealogies are God's mnemonics!"
For the record, there are tons of genealogies in the Bible, often quite repetitive. (That's a lot of review.) The book of Genesis contains quite a few as it relates the earliest ancestors of the human race and the Israelite people (those are the ones my parents originally told me to skip). The line of King David is narrated in great detail, there are many records of the major families of Israel, and the book of Chronicles (the last book in the Hebrew order of the Old Testament) begins with a gigantic genealogical summary from the first man, Adam, all the way down to the author's day. Then, of course, the New Testament contains two genealogies of Christ; one through Joseph, and one through Mary.
I hope people find this post interesting, even if they don't agree with my religion.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Walden Media already has options on all 7 Narnia books. Live action The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is already in production, with Andrew Adamson directing. More here http://www.walden.com/lww.html