mmm, you could be right - I imagined them as lumping the sales of each book of the trilogy with the combined, but there’s no basis for that leap.
Well said - that’s just what I was thinking. I really hope PJ ends up making “The Hobbit,” and that the same actors return as Gandalf, Elrond, and Gollum… with a cameo by Orlando Bloom as Legolas, when the Dwarves get captured by Legolas’s dad. It’d be nice to see a young Estel (Aragorn) at Rivendell, too…
A Legolas cameo would be okay, but add nothing valuable.
I do not even care if Elrond is the same actor, I thought he and Arwen were the worst actors in the movies. Gandalf and Gollum are valuable. Every effort should be made to get them back.
Why? I cannot think of any reason for this add-in. Tolkien did not think to add it in when he revised the finding of the Ring in the Hobbit. He had a chance to. The same actor could not play the part, so why bother. In fact Aragorn would have been ten when Bilbo went through Rivendell.
Jim
I really wouldn’t want to see a Legolas cameo, unless he’s in the background of some random shot, like any other wood elf. Nothing to specifically draw attention to him. Otherwise, it would smack of George Lucas trying to tie every conceivable loose end together in his prequels.
I understand that Legolas was presumably there during the relevant parts of The Hobbit. I just think that drawing attention to it in the movie would be silly and pandering.
As an avid amateur student of JRRT and a fan of the movies, despite having some major disagreements with PJ about his adaptation (Elves out of Helm’s Deep!), I do have to say that I think it’d be a major loss to not have PJ do The Hobbit.
Then, in 15 or 20 years, another enfant terrible can come along and give us their vision of what Middle-Earth is like, complete with Hobbit thru LOTR, and maybe throw a few items in from the Sil (once CJRT has shuffled off this mortal coil).
Maybe PJ can do Bored of the Rings instead.
That Hashberry, she’s hot!
MrDibble writes:
> So that’s 33 333 333 / book give or take a book.
No, did you bother to read my post carefully? I said:
> Incidentally, a copy of each of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers,
> and The Return of the King only counts as a single copy of the novel for these
> figures.
The figure of 100,000,000 for authorized editions and 150,000,000 for unauthorized editions counts either all three books (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) as a single copy or the one-volume edition as a single copy.
Hentor the Barbarian writes:
> My sense of your real desire in your repetition of the question is that you want
> this to devolve into a debate about whether novels I like are better than novels
> you like.
Not at all. My point is that I don’t understand why you want a novel that you don’t like to be changed in the filming so that it’s more like the novels that you do like. Why mess with other people’s favorite novels, which you don’t particularly like, when your own favorite novels could be made into films? Surely if Peter Jackson has changed The Lord of the Rings to be more similar to something you like, it would be better for him to start with a novel that you do like. That would be truer to the spirit of the novel.
Unless this was sarcasm, all I can see is this proves you don’t have a single clue how to make a good movie. Therefore, your opinion of PJ’s LOTR can be instantly dismissed from my mind.
Actually, Franco Zefferelli seems to be able to film classics without tampering with them significantly, especially by not adding something to them that didn’t exist in the first place. It’s one thing to cut, slightly worse to rearrange, but to ADD to a work, that’s just criminal.
PJ did a great job. Ture, he added some stuff some dudes don’t like and cut out some stuff that others missed- but anyone else would have cut far more or added worse.
Hellfire, dudes- can’t any of you remember any other SF books that were made into movies? 90%+ of them ruined. Starship Troopers (although we can argue, and I do- that it’s a fun film is you just pretend it’s not the Heinlein book at all). The Animated LotR! :mad: Conan (again, if you keep telling yourself it’s just a guy with the same name, and it’s not REH’s Conan, it 's a fun flim, it’s NOT REH Conan at all, RedSonya too), and scads more.
Look, no one could have made the perfect LotR, as we all had different films running in out heads when we read it. No one could duplicate a million different versions. Sure, there’s stuff I wne "huh? about and I’d have loved to see some other scenes, but no one, could have made LotR perfect for every viewer. Impossible.
Tom Bombadil was extraneous. I love the sidestory myself- but OK, tell me what 45 minutes of the first film you’d cut to add him in?
PJ is the only dude who can make a The Hobbit that won’t suck. Not that there won’t be nitpickers. There will be those who will say that this scene wasn’t like what they thought it should be, that PJ should have cut that out, and that his adding of whatever is bad. All of which will have merits- but still PJ’s Hobbit would be 10X better than anyone elses.
Looks like someone needs his Weirding Module! 
Okay, let me flip that around and ask you why it is so important to you that a movie be so literally adherent to the book you love so much. It isn’t the book, it could never be the book, it doesn’t remove the book from existence, and you aren’t compelled to see it. Why do you need the book done over again?
How does it affect you and your book in any way that would suggest that the millions of people who saw and loved the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies should not have had that experience?
If Peter Jackson makes The Hobbit movie, how will that diminish your enjoyment of the Tolkien book?
So the mad rush to the toilets in the middle of The Two Towers didn’t clue you in as to why that scene was there?
Hentor the Barbarian writes:
> Okay, let me flip that around and ask you why it is so important to you that a
> movie be so literally adherent to the book you love so much. It isn’t the book, it
> could never be the book, it doesn’t remove the book from existence, and you
> aren’t compelled to see it. Why do you need the book done over again?
It’s a waste of time and money for someone to turn a novel that they don’t like into a film by throwing out the stuff they don’t like and adding other stuff they prefer. If you prefer other novels, make them into movies. Why would you want to make a novel you don’t like into a film? Furthermore, it dishonors the author’s intentions when you change stuff you don’t like into things you like, even though you know that it’s totally different from the author’s intentions. I don’t particularly like the fact that there are now a lot of people who think that Jackson’s weird plot twists, banal dialogue, and distorted characters are like what Tolkien meant.
The argument that a movie is different from a book is pretty silly. Every year, a dozen novels or so get made into fairly faithful movies by Hollywood. (Perhaps dozens of books every year if you count all the foreign movies, but I don’t know enough about those films to make that statement.) It’s not in general that hard to make a good film out of a novel or short story. (Actually, it’s easier to make a short story into a movie.) I don’t think Peter Jackson and his co-writers are good at adapting a novel. I think lots of people could have written better scripts. (I consider Jackson a considerably better director than a screenwriter.) It doesn’t hurt us if a novel fails to get made into a film. There are plenty of good films being made without having to make films that distort their sources.
The way I see it, *LOTR * is a great story. Tolkien based a novel on it. Jackson based some movies on it. It’s still the same story, just seen through the eyes of two different storytellers. Both are flawed and neither is definitive. The same for Homer’s *Iliad * and the movie, Troy.
Given that, I love both versions of LOTR. But I love the Tolkien version more.
Wendell, Return of the King is the second highest grossing movie of all time, with over 1.1 billion dollars in ticket sales. The Two Towers is sixth, and The Fellowship of the Ring is 12th. If that’s a waste of money, count me in for my share of the waste.
Return of the King also won something like 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. If the intention is to make a good movie, you can’t really do much better than that.
If the intention is to please fanboys, well, I’d agree that that would be a waste of time and money, because nothing will be able to live up to their mastery of the text and encyclopedic knowledge of all the backstory for each character.
You know, that’s crap. Look at any one of the very FAITHFUL renditions of Shakespeare plays done by Hollywood over the years. Some of them without a single line cut. Does that preclude doing a movie of a Shakespeare play involving some creative license? Not at all. But that’s because they’ve all been done more than once the RIGHT way.
The first LotR movies should have been done correctly. They should have been incredibly faithful to the text. They should not have been Peter Jackson’s version of the events described in The Lord of the Rings. Most of his additions were done for no other reason than his own ego, to be able to say he had “improved” upon the story.
You will notice I am less critical of material cut; if it isn’t imperative to the story, who really cares. In THAT, at least, I am not critical of the movies. The first Harry Potter film could have used that directorial discretion. I am glad Tom Bombadil was exerpted from the movie.
But ADDING things that aren’t in the original is just wrong on so many levels… :mad:
I’m going to have to say that the idea that there’s a RIGHT way is crap. Creative license is always allowed, even when there aren’t 100% faithful versions available. Being 100% faithful to LOTR would’ve led to some pretty crappy movies.