Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Having Jackson even nominally involved in the project would be a pretty terrible sign for me, after the Hobbit fiasco (which in turn colored my appraisal of ROTK and, in particular, the extended LOTR editions).

As for the writer's room on this show, it looks solid to me:

* Jason Cahill wrote a bunch of episodes for The Sopranos

* Justin Doble wrote 4 episodes in S1 and S2 of Stranger Things, and those are the only two good seasons of Stranger Things

* Gennifer Hutchison won a WGA award for her work on Breaking Bad, which is one of the best shows ever to air

* Bryan Cogman wrote 11(!) episodes of Game of Thrones

* Stephany Folsom was a writer on Toy Story 4 and Thor: Ragnarak

The two show-runners (JD Payne and Patrick McKay) are people I'm not familiar with, but so was DB Weiss before Game of Thrones.

Except for Sean Bean, I didn't know any of the GOT actors either; they're all famous for GOT now. The Amazon LOTR show could be a debacle, but it won't be because they chintzed out on actors.

Agree with Jackson being terrible to even have on for consulting due to what he did to The Hobbit. I wasn’t happy with what he did with some key scenes in LOTR either. I feel the main reason he was left out though is because there might be animosity between him and the Tolkien family in terms of art direction.

The Hobbit production was so heavily rushed, I wouldn’t hold the quality issues against Jackson.

The story was butchered. In his defense it makes sense from the box office perspective. The masses need excitement and spectacle. The original Hobbit story doesn’t have that. It’s more low key.

I felt (maybe without justification) that LOTR shoplifted a lot from the Bakshi LOTR. Which makes what happened with The Hobbit even weirder, because people already managed to adapt it reasonably well for the screen; you wouldn't think "much worse than Rankin-Bass Hobbit" was a likely outcome for the money spent.

It makes more sense when you see the box office numbers which is around $3 billion world wide for all three movies. Ideally, The Hobbit is a single streaming feature movie, but Hollywood rightfully saw an opportunity for another “LOTR”.

I don’t remember where I read it, but the Tolkien clan was not a fan of either movie trilogy.

Minor quibble, but add Charles Dance to your big name actors list. I can't think of any others though... dinklage was kind of known I guess?

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