Lord of the Rings TV Series Purchased by Amazon

[Makabreska]

And before anyone says 'oh so you think everyone who complains about the show is just a grifter man child' no I am not, I am saying if you gotta make one video everyday telling us that on youtube then yes you are.

I mean, it's not really about being a child or not, they are simply milking the topic. Pretty normal behavior for many channels to follow and make multiple comments on the current hottest news, and LotR controversy is very hot right now. I would also not put scorn on this type of behavior, considering being YouTuber is main source of income for many.

[Triceron]

So what did Amazon buy? [B]“We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.”

To be fair, I doubt the Tolkien Estate would ever liscence the latter for multimedia entertainment.

Anything being done with the Second Age in movies or games would have to be mostly new stuff anyways.

[Sluvs]

Hmm, I wrote that with the possibility that Amazon was going to buy the IP on my mind. I read it's going up for sale sometime soon and that Amazon is speculated to be the number one potential buyer, which is why I think it is possible that they expand the "canon universe" on their own because it'd be their property.

Oh, that is interesting. But, IMHO, I still don't think that it would make the series canon, in the end, just the books are canon, everything else is non-canon or "cinematic universe" at best.

I might be wrong though, it does not seem like the tolkien state would sell it.

[Ihavewaffles]

To be fair, I doubt the Tolkien Estate would ever liscence the latter for multimedia entertainment.

Anything being done with the Second Age in movies or games would have to be mostly new stuff anyways.

I used to complain that the family wouldn't license stuff, but with what amazon has done, I have changed my mind...

[Sluvs]

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...rings-of-power
What, Exactly, Is the Source Material Here?

So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.” That takes a huge chunk of lore off the table and has left Tolkien fans wondering how this duo plans to tell a Second Age story without access to those materials. “There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to,” McKay says. “As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to
dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.”

“We took all these little clues and thought of them as stars in the sky that we then connected to write the novel that Tolkien never wrote about the Second Age,” Payne says. The duo cites songs like “The Fall of Gil-galad” (you can hear actor Bill Nighy sing it here from a 1981 BBC Radio adaptation) or “The Song of Eärendil” or Fellowship chapters like “The Council of Elrond” and “The Shadow of the Past” or the “Concerning Hobbits” section of the prologue as sources for significant lore dumps. Beyond the premiere, there aren’t, however, any significant time jumps or, thus far, episode-long journeys to the past. The rights to the First Age material from The Silmarillion are still owned by the Tolkien estate.

“We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkienian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material,” Payne says.

Wow, they don't have permission to use the silmarillion? That explains A LOT, and also makes some things way weirder

[Lorgar Aurelian]

As someone who loves Tolkien Lore and always tunes into channels like Nerd of the Rings and Broken Sword for my lore its really annoying to see youtube recommendations constantly recently keep showing the angry, whingy white boy channels as if to say you may also like this... I am like 'no, no I wont' and you cannot get rid of them I have blocked this one channel whose name rhymes with birdtonic at least 5 times now

This happened with the Star Wars trilogy, before the new trilogy came out I was happy with my Star Wars lore channels then youtube just started sending me angry grifters every day as if to say 'yea, this is the same thing you like'

Have these overgrown man children not grown up yet?

And before anyone says 'oh so you think everyone who complains about the show is just a grifter man child' no I am not, I am saying if you gotta make one video everyday telling us that on youtube then yes you are.

I had this issue with starwars as well when the sequels were fresh, I ended up just blocking any and all starwars content as every time I’d watch any thing starwars related I’d get endless rage videos, hell even today it still happens with SWtor trailers, it’s such a bother and I’d assume adding Lotr to that must be awful.

[Orby]

I feel this way about WoW news. I haven't played in over 10 years, but I still like to catch up on the news around the game. I used to listen to the Instance, but they did a big shift in focus away from Blizzard games since around the time of the big recent lawsuits.

It's hard to find any WoW related news today without someone bringing in an angle. Sometimes I just wanna know what's happening, without it being filtered through some lens.

I wouldn't even know where to start with LOTR news.

Broken Sword and Nerd of the Rings are two really good channels I like as far as anythign tolkien related goes, they most do lore videos but they will always talk about any upcoming news stories related to it,. they been doing trailer breakdowns and stuff recently.

[eschatological]

It's like adapting a Shakespeare play to film but all you can use are Coles Notes.

They've done this, to very great effect. It's a movie called 10 Things I Hate About You, and every woman my age loves that movie. It's based on The Taming of the Shrew.

The Lion King is based on Hamlet. Ian McKellen played a fascist Richard III re-imagined in 1930s Britain. Romeo + Juliet is based on...well, you know, and it was a teen romcom in the 90s, and they used guns instead of swords.

I'm sure there's others I can't think of, off the top of my head.

[Xath]

You're talking about the IP rights for movies and games. The Tolkien Estate is not giving up the LOTR IP. It still would need to be liscenced through them, as well as all non-book material would still be deemed non-canon. Just as all movie and game material already is.

You're talking about a liscencing deal which would allow Amazon to freely build a 'Cinematic Universe' between games and movies and make money off all existing games and movies being sold. It has nothing to do with making anything canonical to the books. We are solely talking about a potential Cinematic Universe. It will never enter the canon of the books, just being clear.

I'm still sad that The White Council was canceled that game was going to be amazing and absolutely unprecedented in terms of Tolkien lore.

- - - Updated - - -

They have 2 more seasons confirmed. Don't think they really mich care about whatever 'blew up on their face', since it doesn't seem to matter as much as people think it does.

No they have one more season confirmed. The "confirmation" of season 3 was a late addition to criminal minds supposedly not being cast as part of the reboot. Aka not even close to an actual confirmation.

[Triceron]

They've done this, to very great effect. It's a movie called 10 Things I Hate About You, and every woman my age loves that movie. It's based on The Taming of the Shrew.

The Lion King is based on Hamlet. Ian McKellen played a fascist Richard III re-imagined in 1930s Britain. Romeo + Juliet is based on...well, you know, and it was a teen romcom in the 90s, and they used guns instead of swords.

I'm sure there's others I can't think of, off the top of my head.

Not quite what I'm talking about, but I get that I used a very loose example. What you've said here is very valid. I mean, my favourite adaptation of Macbeth is Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

These are adaptations that put their own spin on the original tale. Stuff like West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet in story and spirit, but everything else is changed. And to be fair, I probably wouldn't mind seeing something like this if Amazon was up for it. If this series embraced itself as a stylistic interpretation of the LOTR universe, set in the Second Age, I wouldn't be opposed at all. I'd probably accept it like how Star Wars Visions presented a bunch of non-canon Star Wars stories in the style of anime, created by popular anime studios.

The problem I have (and most people seem to) is that they're doing the opposite, and trying to pass the series off as being an authentic story set in the LOTR universe, even though there's very little authentic about it.

[s_bushido]

The problem I have (and most people seem to) is that they're doing the opposite, and trying to pass the series off as being an authentic story set in the LOTR universe, even though there's very little authentic about it.

What does this even mean... Any adaptation that went through the proper channels to get made (as opposed to crap like those ridiculous Transmorphers rip-offs) is as """authentic""" as the next. Anything else is just the sort of worthless gatekeeping that gives fanboys a bad name.

[Triceron]

What does this even mean... Any adaptation that went through the proper channels to get made (as opposed to crap like those ridiculous Transmorphers rip-offs) is as """authentic""" as the next. Anything else is just the sort of worthless gatekeeping that gives fanboys a bad name.

Authentic as an adaptation of its own making, yes. Authentic to the source material, no.

The Michael Bay Transformers movies may have defined themselves and its own style as a 'Transformers film series', but it is not authentic to the original source of the G1 cartoon series.

I mean if we're just talking about adaptations that are being defined by their liscences, then I would actually call that all 'official' rather than 'authentic'. So like the Hobbit Trilogy are all officially liscenced Hobbit movies, but they're not authentic to the original source material (for many reasons which includes changes or additions that were not in the original story)

[ThrashMetalFtw]

"Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made" is not a real quote from tolkien's writings, it is in fact twisted and edited by some random crybabies on the internet. And you using it is funny, because according to the quote, you would be the evil force that twisted and corrupts shit to fit their world view.

The wording of the original quote is more archaic and "Tolkienish" but the meaning is identical.

Twisting the quote would imply that he changed the meaning, which is obviously not the case.

[Dhrizzle]

The wording of the original quote is more archaic and "Tolkienish" but the meaning is identical.

Twisting the quote would imply that he changed the meaning, which is obviously not the case.

The meaning refers directly to the creator of the Orcs, and by the way the "good" of the world also can't create life which is why the dwarves created by Aule were basically automata until Illuvatar breathed life into them from the Flame Imperishable. So what they've done is taken a Tolkien phrase that expressed truths about the reality of Arda and twisted it make a glib phrase in lieu of actual criticism.

[Koriani]

Americans read about 20 minutes a day. Twenty minutes. One glance at the dismally low amount of books our supposedly best authors sell underscores this fact.

Compare 20 minutes of reading to the average amount of time spent gaming, or watching movies and TV shows. Books only matter insofar as they get made into movies or TV shows or have video game adaptations.

As for "best seller's lists", look at how those lists are actually defined. By using Publisher Rocket, any author can easily make it onto a "best seller's list" by writing to market for a category that has only a few books releasing. Authors also make it onto the "best seller" list without actually making it. Usually what happens is that their company buys up 5,000 of the books, and then the author gives the books away for promotion, whilst the purchase is still counted and skyrockets them to the top of the "best seller" list, and then that gets them a lot of publicity and then their books fly off the shelves. It's fake.

Publishers also inflate their own numbers due to the way oldpub works, where they make money not by selling books to bookstores, but instead bookstores returning the books back to the publisher and the publisher destroys the books and gets a tax break. Oldpub is not in the business of actually trying to get people to read books anymore.

Barnes & Noble doesn't make money selling books anymore. They make money selling pens and coffee mugs.



Hahaha

No one says books are more popular than tv.

But people do still read. I see people around me reading all the time. Even these kids these days....

And NERD is a niche genre; it may be a more popular genre now than ever before - certainly more than the 70s/80s/90s I grew up in where most of what nerds were into (like LOTR) was really JUST them.

Now all those people found Tolkein without a movie; and people have been finding Tolkein since the Jackson Triology without having never heard of those movies or seen them. BUT DEFINITELY MUCH more people 'woke up' to Tolkein and LOTR existance as an 'interest' because of the well made movies.

But they /are/ still Niche. Fantasy and Scifi for the most part IS still 'niche' - it remains to be seen if all these (many poor yes) efforts at 'mainstreaming' what is normally for 'nerds' is actually successful or not. It has worked - at least some - but if the ongoing shows/movies being produced stay piss poor in quality then it will just kill the 'interest' again and all us 'nerds' will only be able to lament the missed opportunities and the 'those golden years' when hollywood actually wanted to make this niche genre popular.

And people will still read books. As they do now.

But no, no one's arguing books are equal to tv or movies, or more popular than them. But to state that 'NO ONE reads' is just outright delusional.

[Xath]

No one says books are more popular than tv.

But people do still read. I see people around me reading all the time. Even these kids these days....

And NERD is a niche genre; it may be a more popular genre now than ever before - certainly more than the 70s/80s/90s I grew up in where most of what nerds were into (like LOTR) was really JUST them.

Now all those people found Tolkein without a movie; and people have been finding Tolkein since the Jackson Triology without having never heard of those movies or seen them. BUT DEFINITELY MUCH more people 'woke up' to Tolkein and LOTR existance as an 'interest' because of the well made movies.

But they /are/ still Niche. Fantasy and Scifi for the most part IS still 'niche' - it remains to be seen if all these (many poor yes) efforts at 'mainstreaming' what is normally for 'nerds' is actually successful or not. It has worked - at least some - but if the ongoing shows/movies being produced stay piss poor in quality then it will just kill the 'interest' again and all us 'nerds' will only be able to lament the missed opportunities and the 'those golden years' when hollywood actually wanted to make this niche genre popular.

And people will still read books. As they do now.

But no, no one's arguing books are equal to tv or movies, or more popular than them. But to state that 'NO ONE reads' is just outright delusional.

Nerd really isn't niche anymore for the past decade most of the highest grossing movies and most watched TV and streaming shows have been "nerd" gaming is also a massive industry which is the epitome of nerd.

[Koriani]

Nerd really isn't niche anymore for the past decade most of the highest grossing movies and most watched TV and streaming shows have been "nerd" gaming is also a massive industry which is the epitome of nerd.

Gaming I'll give you - definitely been on the rise since its introduction in the 80s. Course the biggest money makers are gambling-loot-box mainstream SPORTS games, but yes, gaming is definitely not seen as that 'eww your a nerd' negative it use to be.

Movies - eh. SOME nerd genres - like Superheroes because of Marvel. (those top grossing movies you're talking about of the past decade) and giant world-disaster/apocalypse movies(which do fit into this genre to me) and, now because of Disney MORE STAR WARS than ever (good or bad - its scifi but its the same reason we have more comic movies lol) - those are on the 'up' as far as mainstream acceptance. Remains to be seen if this will continue or get beaten into the ground by B grade productions . I mean I hope it keeps going - but we also know Hollywood can burn the 'mainstream' people out on it too if its all crap.

But "Serious Nerd" scifi and fantasy genre stuff like Dune, LOTR type movies, Matrix movies, (And I'll include Inception and Tenet too as they fit that genre to me) are still ONE movie every few years at Best. THIS genre is still 'niche' but yes, gaining ground. And again - since DUNE didn't even get approval for its second half until WB got 'proof of the money potential', it IS still seen as 'niche' enough to 'not guarantee the numbers' to justify them backing their own two-part movie of a single story.

TV - are you serious? HBO had the ONE and pretty much only one - fantasy series in the last 20 years and that's 'most of the shows on tv and streaming?' That's not mainstream yet. Yes, everyone's scrambling to try and copy their 'surprise success' but there's also a reason everyone was 'surprised' (outside of nerd-dom) that it was so successful. A success NONE of these other fantasy/scifi shows have managed to copy yet. No one else has captured that 'lightening in a bottle' - not because the source material isn't good, but because clearly they aren't actual nerds at the helm .

And that's one show out of literally dozens, possibly HUNDREDS that HBO put out in that same 20 year period. It is NOT "most of streaming shows" are scifi and fantasy now. NO they really aren't. Out of dozens of new releases on Netflix a month, most months go by with no scifi or fantasy anything at all. Same with ALL the streaming channels. They may have one or two scifi/fantasy-esque series they put out a YEAR (maybe), but they have dozens and dozens of other genre shows being put out at the same time.

Prior to that we had B grade shows on Scifi that only 'niche' populations watched, Whedonverse/Supernatural/et al. shows on the WB that again only niche populations watched, and the occasional "Awesome show" that was truly nerd-"mainstream", like X-files. We had Firefly (cancelled), Almost Human (cancelled), etc.. And there hasn't been another 'big scifi' show popular like the Xfiles in the 90s, since the 90s. There's been shows with flavorings of scifi mixed in - and some have done well and some never lasted a season.

There ARE other really good and solid 1-3 season Scifi/Fantasy shows on streaming channels out there - but they aren't mainstream, most people haven't watched them or even heard these streaming networks have them in the 'general public' if you ask, they are still a more 'nerd' niche genre. (Lost in Space on Netflix, American Gods on Starz, for examples) Yes, we have Umbrella Academy, and Doom Patrol, and The Boys, et al. also (course all those are comics again) - those ilks. But in no way are those numbers indicating a 'take over' of scifi/fantasy genre shows now being the 'highest grossing/most watched tv shows of them all year after year.' No. I mean I wish - but they just aren't.

Its a niche that is BIGGER for sure than it was in the 80s and 90s, and its pushing to try and get more and more mainstream for the $$ - but it is still niche. The number of scifi/fantasy shows released and in-production (outside of comic book related) in the last ten years is still a minority percentage of the total number of new shows released in that same period.

And everyone on these forums fit THAT niche, simply by sitting here and reading and posting on forums. We may want to think we are 'less nerdy' than we use to be, we may all want to feel more mainstream (I mean I don't give a shit but just saying) - but the fact is, we aren't totally there yet. Its HAPPENING - its getting there hopefully - but until I start seeing primetime scifi shows in the same number as reality shows, dramas, and comedies - we are NOT mainstream yet; and could really easily slip back under - especially the stuff outside of comic book Supes. I mean I just had a talk with a teenager who's big into marvel movies and comics - attending a huge high school here with a probably stronger than average 'high acheiving' population of students because of this area - and even she commented that 'most people at her high school are big into the movies but if I start talking comic stuff their eyes glaze over and they have no idea what I'm talking about.' So no, that's not mainstreaming acceptance of the genre - outside of the movie of the month.

Yes, I know I missed shows and movies that were/are popular and, while not the level of "GoT" for HBO successful, still more mainstream appreciated. But my overall point is even if 10% of the shows being put out are all scifi or fantasy focused - that's still 90% of the rest of the shows that aren't. And that's not 'all the most watched shows' out there. Not even on all the streaming channels. Each one has its own, but its just one or two.

But I am hopeful! Just hope hollywood doesn't burn ALL of us - nerds and non-nerds alike - out on the B grade attempts at cash grabs. Just ruins it for the Dunes and LOTR productions.

[Ivanstone]

But I am hopeful! Just hope hollywood doesn't burn ALL of us - nerds and non-nerds alike - out on the B grade attempts at cash grabs. Just ruins it for the Dunes and LOTR productions.

I prefer not to dwell on things that aren’t out yet.

So far the usual gang of idiots are whining about the usual shit but they aren’t going to be happy anyways. They’re still bitching about something they haven’t seen.

I don’t think Hollywood sets out to make crap but not everything is going to be brilliant. That’s life. It’s fair to mock Netflix over Jupiter’s Legacy, for example, but less than a month later they released Sweet Tooth which was fantastic. I’m not gonna worry about LotR till it’s released. I loved the movie adaptations and books but there’s little point in getting worked up over something I haven’t seen.

[Yossarian]

Talking so much about LotR, don't you feel the urge to read it all again?
I'd start with Silmarillion this time

Or maybe I'd feel angry for what is Amazon doing?

[Triceron]

Talking so much about LotR, don't you feel the urge to read it all again?
I'd start with Silmarillion this time

Or maybe I'd feel angry for what is Amazon doing?

I've been going through Silmarillion on audiobook. There's one on youtube that's like 7 hours long, split up into multiple parts.

It's a nice refresher, putting a lot of stuff into context that I didn't get or was confused about when I read it back when I was still a teen.