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Comment by bjtitus | Hacker News Reader

> They could have just made a new fantasy story with short hair elves, and I think that would have been judged on its own.

And all of 10 people would have watched it. IP is for name recognition more than anything else. What percentage of people who watched the Peter Jackson trilogy actually read a book from the trilogy? I'd bet way less than 50%.

Jackson didn't adhere 100% to the source material either. There are length lists, including many substantial non-narrative related changes, for[1] each[2] film[3].

[1]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_F...

[2]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_T...

[3]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_R...

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> What percentage of people who watched the Peter Jackson trilogy actually read a book from the trilogy?

The trilogy was great because of the writings of Tolkien. Peter Jackson did his best respecting that and telling Tolkien's story, not his own. I think that's why they were successful.

What's the point of adapting a source material if you think it should be changed to begin with? Just don't adapt it... but of course they want the massive fanbase even though they're not acknowledging why it's big in the first place.

> The trilogy was great because of the writings of Tolkien. Peter Jackson did his best respecting that and telling Tolkien's story, not his own. I think that's why they were successful.

Laughable statement. Where did Gandalf hit Pippin when they talked to Denethor in the books? That was in complete contradiction with the Gandalf from the books so please dont tell me this was faithful in any way.

Sauron became a floating eyeball and characters were made into caricatures of themselves (Denethor) or forced to undergo 'character growth' not present in the books (Aragorn, Faramir).

The movies are great, but by no means some sort of gold standard of faithful adaption of the source material.

Do you really think they won't get a massive fanbase just because of the outrage of a couple thousand anonymous strangers on the internet?

As far as I can tell, outrage over controversial changes to the IP (e.g. Game of Thrones, The Last of Us 2, Star Wars 7-9) is _positively_ correlated with popularity.

Fans have completely abandoned GoT after the last season.

The Star Wars Trilogy critically flopped and only 5x their budget compared to +20x for the original trilogy.

The follow up Star Wars content didn't really work out besides the Mandalorian maybe.

The Foundation series is a complete flop as well.

I think it's not as big as it could have been. They might still be successful in terms of views (although that's yet to be seen), but I think that might be because a lot of people are giving it a chance. We'll see how it does towards the end of the season.

I'm not saying it will or won't be popular. I'm saying the quality of the writing according to "proc0" is not going to have any impact on the situation.

> What percentage of people who watched the Peter Jackson trilogy actually read a book from the trilogy? I'd bet way less than 50%.

You optimist. Probably less than 5% :-)

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