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Amazon Is Making a 'Lord of the Rings' Prequel Series (techcrunch.com)
Amazon is making a Lord of the Rings prequel TV series for its Amazon Instant streaming service. The show, which already carries a multi-season commitment, will "explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring." TechCrunch reports: It's possible the new series will mine the ponderous but rich Silmarillion for material, as fan fiction writers and lore aficionados have done for decades. The exploits of the Elf-Lords of old would make for a stirring epic, while many would thrill at the possibility of seeing Moria at the height of its grandeur. So much depends on the quality of the adaptation, though. Amazon has been pretty good about its Originals, but this will be an undertaking far beyond the scope of anything its studios and partners have yet attempted. Amazon is partnering with New Line Cinema, which of course was the film company behind the much-loved trilogy that began in 2001, and the Tolkien Estate, as well as HarperCollins for some reason. The deal also "includes a potential additional spin-off series," presumably if it's popular enough.
And I hope Peter will be involved somehow..
do not want!
If I recall,they filmed the Hobbit at an unusually high framerate. At last, their genius becomes apparent. Simply play back the Hobbit films at a far lower framerate, and hey presto - a 250 hour Netflix series, ready for release!
Personally, I loved reading it - but I'm not sure there's a huge television market of people wanting to watch stories where everyone eventually gets killed by the bad guys.
In comparison to The Silmarillion, the Game of Thrones is a feel-good epic.
#DeleteChrome
There are just to many too many streaming platforms out there. Much less a lot of HBO like ones that have shows on them I don't want to have to buy / deal with 4-5 different stores / ui's / apps / offline rules.
HBO
amazon prime
youtube red
CBS All Access
netflix
etc
HarperCollins has the print publishing rights to Tolkein's work, so if there are any books to come out of this....
Hobbit was a tale of small town heroes adventuring away, whereas LotR was an epic tale of the plight of humanity against malicious and demonic adversaries. Huge scale difference.
With this prequel, they could potentially create something on par with LotR in terms of scale. However, few of the original LotR actors would be involved in the prequel... so the success or failure is going to depend upon the direction, the story and the casting. The LotR franchise (including The Hobbit) are on thin ice though. If there is a whiff of any garbage getting into this new series, it will lose its audience faster than Sauron losing everything with the loss of his ring finger.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Get Blind Guardian to make the soundtrack!!
Someone call PETA itâ(TM)s animal abuse to milk this poor cow so many times.
Never mind...
Did anyone even go see The Hobbit?
They were a blockbuster success. $3 billion gross box office. A lot of people saw them.
I personally enjoyed them, but didn't really like them. I liked parts of them, and even enjoyed some of the changes they made, and backstory bits they added in.
But even with the additions it felt like butter scraped over too much bread. ;)
Anything less than production values equal to the movies won't do well.
Aside from that, it'll depend on the writing. A TV adaptation of the tale of Lúthien and Beren could be very cool. Tolkien wrote the bare outline in the Silmarillion, but no dialog and not a whole lot of detail. It's a love story, so Hollywood can just use it, rather than shoehorning in a bullshit love story of their own (thanks for nothing, Hobbit). It also fits well in the current zeitgeist, since Lúthien does a lot of the heavy lifting, again without any shoehorning of bullshit.
Now as another poster has pointed out, it's a tragedy. Everybody dies. More than once, in Beren's case. (Yay for divine intervention.) That plays well in Asian markets, but not so well in the West. There is a happily-ever-after for the pair though, so good enough.
Done well, it could work. Done badly, it could look and feel like MTV's travesty of an adaptation of the Elfstones of Shannara. We can expect Netflix to do a better job than MTV. How much better remains to be seen.
Those three LotR films were ponderous, long winded and felt like they would never end.
Seems like they nailed it to me.
Don't knock it, Bored of the Rings was hilarious... although it was a better read in the late 70's than it would be now; it really didn't age well.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
And i always thought the name of the prequel to the Lord of the Rings was: The Hobbit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I agree with this.... [a shadow seems to pass over sconeu's face]. I would say more, but a shadow seems to have passed over my face.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
https://youtu.be/t6AHCK3if-I
I only watched the first five minutes but that's enough.
If they're actually going to the Silmarillion, then that could be something. It would be quite something to see Tuor's journey to Nevrast and meeting with Ulmo, Lord of the Waters, or Ungoliant's poisoning of the Two Trees, and Nírnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, would make any other filmed fantasy battle look like a game of Stratego in comparison. Go to the Second Age, a full recounting of the Fall of Numenor would make for an extraordinary sequence.
But probably it will just be about young Thorin traipsing about Middle Earth, or Bullroarer's licentious joinings with busty Hobbit lasses.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This really puzzles me. Christopher Tolkien has said many times, some in court, that no further words of his father's will ever be filmed. That LotR and The Hobbit were exceptions because JRRT sold the rights while he was still alive, but no more under any circumstances. This is why Jackson had The Hobbit and some material from the appendices at the end of Return of the King (if you haven't read them, you should -- there are stories in there) instead of filming "The Quest of Erebor", the larger, more serious version of The Hobbit that was supposed to align more completely with LotR, which JRRT hadn't finished prior to his death. QoE is told from Frodo's perspective, as he receives the tale from Gandalf.
So why, after all these years of feeding off his father's works, and hamstringing further attempts at filming his father's works, does Christopher suddenly give the ok to film other stories, to his old nemesis New Line, of all people?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
seems to be working for George R R Martin.
The Hobbit should have never been 3 2 hour movies. Especially as LoTR was 3 2 hour moves.
That said, if Netflix can bring interesting stories to the canon, who the hell cares? Good stories are good, bad stories are bad.
LotR was an epic tale of the plight of humanity against malicious and demonic adversaries.
What humans? LotR was just a never ending borefest of ghosts and goblins. I didn't get what anyone got excited about. The material while original in it's day (ie the book in the 50's), has been retold so many times in every fantasy/sci-fi genre ever since that it was all a bit predictable.
I watched the trilogy but baulked at the thought of doing it all again for the Hobbit. Enough flogging, the horse is dead...
Not while Christopher Tolkien is alive.
Surely The Hobbit was the prequel to Lord of the Rings...
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Depends. TV as a medium has shifted DRAMATICALLY in the last few decades.
If it's 1980's style "self contained story every episode" type TV then yeah, it'll be stupid. If it's the more modern format of it essentially just being one huge story chopped into 1-hour long chunks then that will work fine.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
+1
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