So, they're remaking Lord of the Rings?

Great?

The article there says "reboot," and the article is cites as a source says "reboot," too, but the thing that article cites just says "new films." It's a nice little microcosm of how people on the Internet misunderstand something, and then become a source unto themselves for no particular reason.

The report I saw just said multiple films based on Tolkien's work, which could mean a lot of other (moderately less galling) things.

it would be good if they do it after the 3rd

I just Googled for Lord of the Rings remake and got a blizzard of articles that I have not read. It all seems pretty vague at this point, subject to corporate maneuverings. "Details are scant on the timeline or scope of the projects" - I guess we will have to wait for the next shoe to drop.

https://www.polygon.com/23612553/new...gs-movies-lotr

they better not remake it

Yeah, I agree. Sometimes I just don't get the whole business of remakes, since they are rarely as good as the original. In the case of LOTR, it seems like an almost impossibly ambitious task to do something better or bigger.

same here they always ruined the originals. i know right they had amazing cast and storylines and seem like they are out of ideas

I think this is likely driven by the desire to make more money off what has historically been a very profitable franchise. However, I think they already made this mistake once. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was incredibly well done. "The Hobbit" trilogy was, in my opinion, not. There was clearly not enough story to build a trilogy around. They may have been able to make one good movie, but three wasn't possible with the material that they had, and they did it anyway. It's far inferior to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don't understand why Peter Jackson came back to the world he created to do it.

That's the problem. The spinoffs, in some ways, were as good as the LOTR trilogy in the sense of the technical aspects, but they are also also formulaic. We all knew what Middle Earth looked like, who the characters are and how things are supposed to go. After the original trilogy, all of the others, regardless of their assets, are like the 4th, 5th and 6th episodes of Dragnet. We know the formula now so there's no novelty, just the let down that it's not as fun as the earlier movies. It's like the sequels, prequels and spin offs of the Star Wars universe....ho hum.

Saying that they're "rebooting" it will probably attract more clicks, either from fans or *infuriated* fans, so some of these websites tend to twist the wordage to get to that.

Overall, I assume they've caught some momentum based on the positive reception that Rings of Power had. To be fair, that show was pretty darn good, so I don't blame the business heads for trying to milk more out of it. I guess that, like most everything else, it all depends on what stories they choose and who to put in charge of them.

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Yeah, while I don't feel great about this, and while I had my issues with The Rings of Power, it was much better (in some ways at least) than I expected.

Gonna stay pretty neutral on this. If it IS a reboot of sorts, though, I just can't see that being a good idea. Give it a couple more decades.

From what I've read, what the higher-uppers have said about all of this is that Tolkien's literature and the whole appendixes, or whatever you wanna call them, give them enough source material to build different stories that expand on the universe, and not necessarily redo The Lord of the Rings, and I guess I'm kinda OK with that. I'll probably approach it as I did Rings of Power, which was that I jumped in after I saw the reception was positive. My wife saw it first, she told me it was good, so that was it.

so are these new ones gonna be like double-dipped onion rings? because i'd be ok with that

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

To be fair, I only saw the first Hobbit movie. I really disliked it, so I didn't watch the other two in the trilogy. It's possible that the movies got better, and that as a result, I may not be the best judge of the qualitative potential of more LOTR movies. I haven't seen "Rings of Power".

I think it's unlikely that they'd fully reboot what was a very successful franchise, and think that they are liking going for more of an "expanded universe" concept here.

From my perspective, I think the reason the "Star Wars" sequels did not work is because there was no narrative cohesion and no compelling story arc that progressed over the three movies. Better planning on that could have led to better movies, and there is nothing preventing the filmmakers here from learning those lessons as they seek to expand this franchise.

Sorry, what? I've only ever seen negative feedback on that show. If it didn't have Tolkien's name attached to it, it would have been mediocre, but as a Middle-Earth story, it's pathetic.

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Remakes aren't all bad. The Front Page (1931) was remade as His Gal Friday (1940) adding a sexy angle to a patter filled movie. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was remade into the musical In the Good Old Summertime (1949). Others just waited a respectful time before reusing old plots Love Affair (1939) was remade into An Affair to Remember (1957) the only change there was they went from B&W to color film. I think there were a lot of these updates as the audience enjoyed the same stories but wanted them in the new format.

For funzies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_remakes_(A%E2%80%93M)

I don't imagine there is any appetite for a new interpretation of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003). I hope if they continue to exploit this fantasy trilogy they make something commensurate with the Jackson's trilogy.

I saw a whole lot of complaining about it before it was ever released (a lot of it based on culture war stuff, seemingly, which ended up being basically nothing in the final product; it was almost entirely highlighted for PR reasons). That's why I say I was pleasantly surprised: I'd been primed to think it was gonna be really bad. But it wasn't. I have my issues with it, but there are some parts that are really, really exceptionally good.

Unfortunately once some of those issues come into play, it becomes extremely easy to only see the negative (or positive, depending on your valence) opinions. The algorithm knows what we want, after all.

As yet, however, it does not quite know how deliver it. And it is not good at delivering us what we didn't know we wanted. Ford once quipped that people riding horses didn't know that they wanted motor vehicles. You need a visionary artist to move us into new territory. At least, that's the case right now. The algorithm is not yet prepared to challenge us to grow, to want something better. In time, however, these hack-writer algorithms will probably hack us quite effectively. When that happens, however, these "writers" will no longer need to strip-mine the works of dead human writers to dazzle us.

It was divisive, but most critics, or at least ones that I trust and follow, were praising it. It has an 83% Tomatometer score (versus a 38% for Audience! ) but I also saw that a lot of the criticism it got was from racist f*cks who were mad that some of their elves weren't shiny white and blond anymore.

The context I was thinking of was the algorithm that feeds us editorials saying the thing we already agree with. I was talking about bubbles where "everyone knows" something was bad, or literally doesn't hear one good thing about a show/movie/book, but that this is ultimately by design.

I definitely did not mean that the algorithm is particularly good at knowing what we want in a creative sense. I do not believe that, and I'm fairly skeptical it'll ever get half as good at that as people hope/fear.

EDIT: adding that your interpretation of what I said is reasonable, I was vague. The above is just a clarification.