Hobbit Movie in Four Years?
Antarctic Lemur writes "At the Powerhouse Museum LOTR Exhibition in Sydney, Peter Jackson has said a film version of The Hobbit is three years away at least. Reasons for the delay include the sale of MGM, which part-owns the movie rights to The Hobbit, and Jackson's recently filed suit against New Line Cinema, the other part-owner. Jackson is currently filming King Kong at his new facility in Wellington, NZ. Slashdot readers will also be interested in the high security planned for King Kong's pre-release screenings."
I'll admit I opt-out of a lot of pop culture, but I don't know ANYONE looking forward to the King Kong movie.
Is this wishful thinking on their part? Am I completely out of it? Or is this a new marketing tactic?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
If I was distributing movies I wouldn't want anyone to get their little dirty hands on the copies and distribute the copies without my permission.
Technically speaking it is possible to achieve this, it is possible to require ID from everyone going to see the movie, and keep that info in the database. The movie itself could have embedded watermarks of somesort, so that it would be possible to correlate the illegal copy to a specific screening, and by using cross linking with other copyright infringement incidents it could be possible to narrow down the list of suspects to just a few. Then bring out the lawyers and just destroy the mofos who film movies in the theaters and distribute them.
Securing the DVDs sent to the Oscars judges (or whoever) is even easier, I cannot believe how many good quality copies are available.
Anyhow, it should be possible to reduce the incidents of such nature by annihilating a few of these 'pirates'.
You can't handle the truth.
He has the sense to make movies people will actually WANT to see.
TODO: Something witty here...
Why would he focus on the Hobbit when the Silmirilion would make a much better movie.
The Silmarillion is not a good movie story. It's a collection of background notes that were never meant by their author to be published, a dense tome that is read by fanatics of the Lords of the Rings for it's value-adding goodness. Not a product suitable for mass market appeal.
The Hobbit, however, is a light tale of dragon-slaying adventure with characters and settings already familliar to the consummers.
You can't take the sky from me...
If the bootlegs appear at around the time of the first screening, many people will not go to the cinema.
The people who stay at home to watch the free low-quality bootleg wouldn't have gone to see it at the theatre anyway.
Personally, as uninterrested as I am in yet another remake of King Kong, if I wanted to see it at all it would be on a BIG screem, to enjoy the bigness.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm not exactly an insider (apart from living in the same town as Peter Jackson), but I don't think that's so much the issue here. As far as I can tell, he wants what's fair and what he was contracted for. Even if you love your day-job, you should make sure that your employer isn't ripping you off. They are getting your work out of it, after all. Look how much Newline's benefiting from Jackson's work. I'd be annoyed if they weren't giving me my fair share that'd been previously arranged.
What Peter Jackson loves a lot is making movies (and various other things like restoring WW1 fighter planes). He's built up an entire industry in NZ, based around his film-making and special effects companies, which personally I think do a very good job. If Newline's shortchanged him by several tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (I forget how much it is), it automatically hinders his ability to do everything else that he really loves doing, including his own investment in other films that he thinks are worth making.
In any case, I don't think he's another George Lucas. The telling point for me is that Lucas has been irritating his fans in exchange for the money he can make from them. Jackson's simply fighting with his employer for what he thinks he's owed.
Here's a partial list of movies that should NEVER, EVER, EVER be remade again, having been absolutely beaten into the ground:
Please join me in ridiculing those who insist that these deserve yet another interpretation!!!
Thanks
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou