It seems to me that all these large corporations are more concerned with following ESG than with their own customers. What happens if you don’t follow “the message” we saw with Tesla some months ago.
So yes, they're making money.
(I have no opinion on these films btw; I haven't seen them, and only dimly remember the old ones – I never cared much for them.)
The new films are just milking every ounce of life out of the franchise. The money they're making is indeed peanuts to what a talented crew could have made.
At any rate, the message I originally replied to was "do these movies make money though?", and the answer to that is "absolutely yes!" I don't really have an opinion on Star Wars as I didn't care all that much even for the older films. They probably could have been better (and made more money!), but it's the difference between "making a fuckton of money" vs. "making a shitton of money", so to speak. You don't need to make "the best" to actually make money; "good enough" is, well, good enough.
I'm not saying make a product for only the fans. But stay honest to source or previous material.
The point is that vocal fans who demonstrate their wrath or joy online are a very minor part of what makes a production succesful or unsuccessful.
For a modern Hollywood director, if you put in just a little obnoxiously "woke" stuff, just a pointless gender or race swap, or maybe make someone gay or trans who wasn't in the source material... Now if it fails just for being bad, you can claim it failed because of those handful of people who complained about it online.
So it's not that the "woke lobby" has that much power to force directors to "cast diversely" or something, it's just that it's a convenient excuse for everyone involved. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, and nobody ever got fired for making a film look a bit more like affluent modern America.
Most media today looks the same, over-reliant on digital postprod and fuck all practical effects.
It also tends to just keep recycling the same properties ad nauseum, getting worse each time.
People are, frankly, bored of it.
Take Squid Game for example. I don't speak Korean and know next to nothing about Korean society, yet its core story about a group of people in desperate circumstances being forced to constantly reevaluate what they're willing to do to survive resonates with me just as well as if the show had been set in any other country.
Compare that with The Rings of Power, where Galadriel is portrayed as a perfect warrior woman whose biggest source of antagonism is the weak and unprincipled men around her. Or She-Hulk, who has to explain to Bruce Banner that men telling her how to do her job makes her a better Hulk than him.
Young progressives lap this stuff up but it leaves everyone else cold, including many women. In years to come, these stories are not going to be loved. These films and TV shows are not going to top any polls. The characters are rotten, unlikable and will not live on in anyone's hearts.
If those people aren't the core audience, why did they pay out of the nose to use that name in the first place? They could do a fantasy story written all in-house, and save themselves the money. If you're right, the audience should be almost as big, and they get to skip the part where they're accused of grave-robbing.
Like me, I enjoyed the trilogy. I don't care if this new show isn't in "the spirit" of Tolkien (judged by someone far after his death, how much does that even mean?), I'm gonna watch it because I've heard of the IP before and want to try it out.
What a weird way to dismiss my points..?
Every casual viewer I've spoken to is very meh on the show.
(a) Creative leaders (producer, director, writer) hired for these projects chafe at having anyone tell them what to do (and this especially includes the source material!).
(b) Creative leaders hired for these projects are typically not themselves fans, and do not elevate anyone who is a fan to a position of authority, and so lack even an awareness of the material. And critically, an awareness of what current fans enjoyed in it. Which is sometimes a feeling or deeper than just "these specific characters or places."
(c) As big budget projects, and costly rights acquisitions to start with, there are powerful committees put in place to keep creative on the rails, who are even more (a) & (b) themselves.
As a result, there is literally no one in the room with a powerful voice who understands why so many people liked this thing.
Say what you want about recent Marvel & Star Wars, but Feige/Favreau/Filoni seem to have a better sense and balance of "Why did people like this thing originally?" and "What will attract people who aren't fans?"
In the former, you could argue your own creative vision might be "better" (in the loose sense), given the lack of popular success of the source.
In the later, it'd be a fair amount of hubris to assume you can make something more beloved than Tolkien's works.
Hubris, arragance, etc. You're coming back to words that mean the same thing. Just because it's a work you personally are not familiar does not make it more/less egregious that someone has taken the material in their own direction from the original. It's just that you have a personal connection to the orginal and may or may not like the reworked version.
That's why Amazon paid $$$$ for the rights.
It's unreasonable to ignore that and claim that taking the same amount of artistic license with Tolkien is the same as taking it with something else.
It is objectively different to adapt a more popular and well-known work.
Sometimes it really is best to minimize the artistic license and let the masters work shine through.
We know the big operators purchase these franchises (economic wrappers around fictional universes) to pursue profit. They modify the stories and characters to optimize profit, they've been doing it for about a century, and they're very good at it.
* You're getting old and your not spending as much money. * Getting 5$ from 100.000.000 people is better than getting 50$ 1.000.000 people. Especially if you can do it at lower costs. * Getting in new audiences to keep the franchise alive and healthy * And last but not least the average consumer is not interested in it being "true" to some kind of book or whatever. It has to make sense, but not in a true to the original author kind of way.
Intentionally aggravating your most passionate fans is a moronic business plan — like a mobile game that intentionally pisses off the “whales” to pursue casuals.
Are you objecting to the general idea that highly engaged customers produce disproportionate impact — or just those specific numbers?
If the latter, okay… but that doesn’t address my point that it’s a bad business plan, just quibble about it.
Today I saw physical adverts for House of the Dragon on the train ride home. The only thing I thought about was how shit the last season of Game of Thrones was and how I will never read any media about that world again. Even though I would have watched a new show set in a completely different world with the production quality I saw in the posters.
Currently Big Corp is spending billions on acquiring IPs which rather quickly end up having negative value. This is, to put it mildly, not good business sense.
I think good art comes from individuals with fantastic visions; but since no individual can fund things at the scale to compete in the attentional arms race, we are left with endless bland re-hashes since these compete on existing brands and thus are lower risk.
There are probably more than 10x as many people who remember liking the lotr movies as a kid than who are close enough friends with a member of that fanatical core of Tolkien fans to have the show personally recommended to them and probably many times again as many people who are just generally aware of the popularity of LotR. That's the real benefit of the IP. Having some really dedicated fans help hype it up for a few weeks/months before it comes out doesn't hurt, but their job is pretty much done by the time it actually releases.
Then you blame people who understand what was lost for complaining and call them racist.
Few people have problems with changes for the better. But the changes are usually for worse. In the Witcher season 1 most changes were well received (introducing Yennefer backstory for example). But removing the Ciri & Geralt scene which was the pinnacle of the 2 short stories collecting just so that they can put 30 minutes of Ciri walking with that black elf that has no influence on anything else in the story was just dumb. Pacing was awful, and they had to cut the good stuff.
The story got objectively worse, but people who didn't read the books won't complain cause they don't know what they missed.
2. There’s only 68 million Gen Z compared to 72 million Millenials.
3. You keep a franchise alive and healthy by protecting the core IP and making the fans happy not by alienating them and making terrible renditions of the story. If you do that then all you have left is a name that is increasingly associated with bad writing and acting and eventually it becomes a joke that no one will turn out for.
And one way to make them spend that money is to target their kids, which is much more easier to do so ...
People who care about the lore and source material are insignificant compared to the amount of people who just enjoy a lavish production in a medieval fantasy setting.
Clearly Amazon is targeting the people who enjoyed the movies and want a similar experience in a TV show format. Most don’t really care that it conforms to what Tolkien wrote. Heck, I’m probably unusual compared to the average watcher in that I have actually read LotR and the Silmarillion as a teenager and I don’t care about fidelity to the source material.
Don’t get me wrong I wish Amazon had the courage to just put 500 millions of dollar on completely new IP but that’s just not how American entertainment companies work.
The Fellowship of the Ring (film, 2001) is just over 20 years old, which creates, now, 25-45 year olds significant childhood nostalgia, just in time for them to be able to show their ~5-15 year old children (in their most formative years)
Would I watch a generic IP they invented? No. At least not until it got huge and I got it recommended by others.
I didn't read Dune nor Brave New World, but I loved the Dune movie and didn't enjoy Brave New World series, because it just didn't make sense. I love exact book adaptations even if I hadn't read the book.
> the type of people who are most likely to buy a particular product, watch a particular TV programme, etc.
The Tolkien fans don't need a dozen Amazon Prime adverts to watch a new LoTR show, they seek out new LoTR content on their own.
To give my perspective, I also read LoTR as a teenager, but did not finish the Silmarillion, and enjoyed the Peter Jackson trilogy. It doesn't take a LoTR lore researcher fluent in Elvish to realize that Jackson set the bar high, and the new show appears to be falling significantly short. That's just the reality of trying to adapt a beloved franchise with excellent predecessors. The 1/10 reviews might be hyperbolic, but it's ridiculous for Amazon to be removing them while leaving the equally hyperbolic 10/10s.
This season is going to cost twice as much as the original three movies. That’s completely insane.
Fargo had 10x less budget and was much more entertaining.
Best to just let all reviews stay, it opens up a massive can of worms if you don’t (never mind the conflict of interest in why LotT gets a different treatment than, say, HBO’s shows).
And then the studios are approaching each adaptation as a committee instead of as a visionary. It's writing-by-committee instead of writing as an individual.
And frequently these mediocre writers roll into established franchises and actively make editorial decisions as if they're the reason were watching e.g. LotR. Newsflash, Tolkien is a far better writer than whoever is on Amazon's payroll, probably best to just stick to his ideas whenever possible. If you want to innovate you'd piss less people off doing a mediocre job in a brand new universe.
The reason why most of the Marvel TV shows, Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, Halo etc. all appear to be "dumbed" down is because the target audience are teens and young adults. It's the "catch them young" tactic - all these streaming services are competing to get teens hooked to their streaming services. The next gen spend more time hooked to their screens than our generation. And we "oldies", having seen tons of shows now can't be so easily thrilled with a new show. But even if a show is a damp squib, teens can still be excited by certain elements of it as it will be a new experience for them. Generate the right emotions, and you have them hooked ...
It's not an either or situation here. Shows can be written to target many, many groups of audiences. They can be "smart" while still appealing to the masses.
Also, it's not so much dumbed down as just terrible acting and terrible writing. Cinematics are great, but cinematics are the only thing that's great.
Emotionally invested fans of these stories clearly exist and describing them as the core audience isn’t a dishonest claim. Neither is it dishonest to claim that some of these fans feel alienated by the new versions of these stories.
You can debate both claims, and my views don’t align perfectly with OP’s either but there is no intellectually dishonesty on the the part of the OP in making the claims.