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MGM and Warner Near On Deal For Hobbit Films
Jamie found an NYT story that says "After months of negotiation and delay, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are on the verge of an agreement that would allow the director Peter Jackson to begin shooting a two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit early next year." The production has struggled recently with issues with unions, and a fire.
Yet another opportunity to wear funny glasses for three hours and have pointy objects thrust at me repeatedly.
Maybe he'll buck the trend and NOT do it in 3D?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
The studios pulled the infamous Hollywood Accounting scam, of trying to pretend that LOTR didn't make any money, in order to keep from paying Jackson his contractual shares of profits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
I'd suspect that they must have come to some sort of an agreement with Jackson. Either setting up payment on what they owe in LOTR, or sweetening the $ from the Hobbit in some way in order to make up for it.
What's even more interesting to me, is that the article doesn't mention this at all. The article reads so much like a press release that I wonder if it's cribbed directly from a couple of different press releases.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
I would have preferred he left the undead army thing from ROTK out to be honest. Kinda made the whole struggle feel pointless when there was an army with noclip and god mode fighting that comes along and defeats the bad guys with ease.
And can you imagine ROTK with the attack on the Shire? People already complained about how long the ending dragged on. :p
I think this is well explained in the books and in the movie, though somewhat in the subcontext: hobbits have so little power and are so devoid of ambitions (other than living a very simple life) that the Ring doesn't have a strong effect on them. It would corrupt a powerful being such as a Maia (such as Gandalf) or a great Eagle. Moreover, that might explain why the Ring has absolutely no effect on Tom Bombadil. But maybe I'm seeing too much.
Actually, the Silmarillion would be fine - it's a set of short stories, many of which would make fine movies. No one needs to see Genesis on the screen, but there's great movie material past the begats.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yqVD0swvWU
Not to mention that the undead army never made it to Pelannor Fields. They defeated the Corsairs of Umbar, were released from service, and the reinforcements came from the freed slaves and the now un-besieged coastal region.
Allowing Saruman his final chance of redemption (to wait out the war & think about why he (and other Istari) was sent to middle earth), show that even Fangorn was susceptible to Saruman's final evil skill (voice), and show the damage which can still be caused by a hollowed out "powerless" voice set loose among a good-natured group such as the Shire, cheats Gandalf and Saruman of character and Tolkien of some of his more subtle points. Not to mention cheating the Shire of it's endurance before and hard-will after the rising sparked by the returning hobbits.
I don't know how I stumbled across this but here is an interesting theory about Tom Bombadil being Sauron. It's from a Usenet posting circa 1996.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
The lesser Rings weren't (exactly) related. It was apparently an innate property of Hobbits - even Gollum should have faded away a long time before the story began. Speculations on why the Hobbits should have such a property I think everyone else in this thread explained better than I could.
The Rings for the other races are an interesting question, though. The Elves alone made their three rings, so it's understandable they wouldn't corrupt the Elves, and there's no reason why the Ring of Power wouldn't corrupt Elves, especially High Elves like Galadriel. Men need no explanation. But Dwarves...we learn in the Lord of the Rings that Dwarves could not be corrupted by the rings Sauron gave them, and they would not fade away. The only thing Sauron could get them to do was inflame the Dwarves' natural greed for wealth, which Sauron could then manipulate (if he was lucky) to bring about their demise. But as far as we are told, it's a perfectly natural Dwarven greed, not the evil corrupting greed we would expect. So to what degree would Dwarves be affected by the One Ring, anyway? Unlike Elves and Men, Dwarves were designed by their creator Aule to specifically have a lot of endurance and incorruptibility. So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
I've never know why people complain about Tom Bombadil being left out. It was IDIOTIC, and complete jarring to the flow of the story. As the the scourging of the shire, after ALL that happened, it was very anticlimactic. The only good thing about it is that it should how much the four hobbits had grown in experience and confidence.
So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
No. Even the lesser rings they had did corrupt them and brought Evil to the Dwarves. Sauron could not control them, the way he could Men so his plot "failed'. But research what happened to each of the 7 Ring Bearers of the Dwarves...
In Letters, JRRT says there are only a few beings in Arda that can control and use the 1 ring - pretty much Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel.
You had to have Great Power yourself to master the One Ring. No mortal could do it and dwarves are technically mortals.
Every one else attempting to use the Ring would eventually fail and Sauron would eventually prevail. The Ring is part of Sauron after all...
Bad Theory. Frodo gave the ring to Bombadil to look at and Bombadil showed that he had power over the ring, something the Witch King would not have, so Bombadil is not the Witch King. If he was then he would have taken it immediately back to his master, Sauron, but he didn't, he gave it back to Frodo, something the Witch King would never have done. Elrond's refusal to let Bombadil keep the ring is more out of his understanding that Bombadil, though powerful, could not be trusted as he would just as easily misplace it as keep it safe. (An alternative no better than throwing it in the deep ocean hoping it lost forever. Elrond wanted the ring destroyed and guided the council to that purpose.)
Bombadil is an enigma that Tolkien purposefully never wanted explained. The theory I prefer is that he and Goldberry are one of the Aniur that was appointed to do a task, probably by Manwë, in that area of Middle Earth in the Third Age.
Or cool Elves! By the time of the Lord of the Rings, the only remaining Elves are the uncultured types (Legolas) and the aging hippies laying around and doing nothing but reminiscing about better days (Elrond and Galadriel). The Silmarillion is like, their Woodstock with fire and demons. Take Feanor, the greatest Elf ever to live. You know the Palantir? Those were like, one of his weekend projects he did when he got bored one day. When he wasn't making cool stuff, he was standing up to the Man. And by that, I mean when the most powerful god in Middle-Earth came knocking, the guy who could take on all the other gods alone in the beginning, the guy who kept Sauron around as a pet, Feanor slammed his door in the dude's face and told him to gtfo. This dude's last words were basically "DO IT BIG, GUYS. DO IT BIG."
And you know how all the Elves in LotR are goody-two-shoes pansies? Not in The Silmarillion. Do things like "the Kinslayings", "the Curse of the Noldor", the "Oath of Feanor", and "The Grinding Ice" sound like pansy crap to you? When these Elves showed up, the Big Bad had to invent dragons because Orcs were completely and utterly outmatched. When they saw Balrogs, these Elves didn't call out for Gandalf. Feanor took on multiple Balrogs and their troll-guard at once. Glorfindel - the same dude who got cut from the LotR movies - fights and kills a Balrog. And dragons, oh man, were there dragons. Smaug in the Hobbit is like a baby dragon. Ancalagon the Black crushed mountains (plural) when he fell from the skies.
The Silmarillion - if you take the time to get past Genesis, which is important backstory - is not a story for the faint of heart. It's full of incest, treachery, gods, treachery, and much more. You'll recognize a couple characters from the Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is a very, very intricate story, and it does take time to understand, but once you've got a grasp on it, it's pretty mindblowing.
Also, you get to see Sauron put to shame by a man, his girlfriend, and their loyal dog.