Warner Brothers Plans Revamp of LotR | Hacker News Reader

Warner Brothers Plans Revamp of LotR

variety.com

22 pointsdpcx56 comments

The LotR movies are now over 20 years old.

When I watched LotR, I was around 20 myself, and a then 20 year old movie (which would be an early 80s movie) would seem like a movie from a completely different era to me.

Today, LotR still seems somewhat fresh to me, and this article and HN comments here seem to agree given that new LotR movies from today are still being linked to this 20 year old one.

What gives? Is it just my age and similar age of the HN crowd? Or is there truly more difference between 1983 and 2003, than between 2003 and 2023?

Probably non-linear video editing and the ability to add somewhat believable CGI gave it much longer shelf life than what would be expected.

Cultural stagnation + technological advances. Home theaters and special effects haven't really improved in 20 years, at least they have not at the rate seen from 1980 to 2000.

I think it is just a ton of loving attention to detail in the sets, costumes, music and performances. Crucially for movies of that era, I think the CGI is also tastefully done and blended with the rest of the film. They didn’t go for much of the kinds of full CG scenes we see in todays Marvel movies you could make an apples to apples comparison for and see the gulf in techniques you get over a few decades, but they also didn’t use techniques like stop motion or muppets that seem aged to us when looking at 80’s films.

I think that we just reached a point of diminishing returns on special effects in the early 2000s. The improvements since then have mostly been in reducing the cost to produce convincing CGI, with very little gain in the maximum quality that can be achieved.

We can push the envelope vastly farther today than in the early 2000s. The difference is movies now have so much CGI that they can’t afford to spend much time on any of it.

Consider the LOTR orc army shots. Now days we can simply simulate various AI characters walking on uneven surfaces and it looks fine. The regimented look on flat ground worked, but it was based in large part on limitations at the time and just felt off. But conversely this means the army could and therefore would show up in the background in several shots which then means more vastly more CGI is needed. Unfortunately, more seconds of CGI means less me only you can spend on each of those seconds.

I am 26 and the movies still feel fresh. I didn't even get to watch the movies until I was an adult...I only had the books, so the respect the movies had for the books was very special to me.

What pisses me off about Warner Bros is how they are latching onto LotR and Harry Potter because they were glorious 20 years ago, and they want to reclaim that glory without putting any work in to make something worth watching. They would rather milk one man's life's work to death for a cheap buck instead of trying to make something new. And, its probably going to be successful. Harry potter was fun 20 years ago, LotR was fun 20 years ago, but as a society we need to move on to new works instead of latching onto past success. If Warner Bros could realize that, they would be better off for it.

> If Warner Bros could realize that, they would be better off for it.

It seems clear to me, after the whole takeover via David Zaslav, that Warner Bros is being forced into an unearned bankrupcy -- they're actively killing anything they have that is-or-was new, exciting, or fresh (even many works already created and paid for). HBO Max was one of the few optimistic brightspots in that market, and they're now hanging it out to dry (and giving that market share to Paramount in the process).

But you know, the stock market loves it, so it must be good. I look forward to seeing this new version of "The Lord of the Rings", as lovingly crafted by the folks at TLC, exclusively on Discovery Plus.

I hope any further LotR work will be willing to take more risks. The Rings of Power did not take any, and hence was stultifyingly dull.

Im still upset that they cancelled Final Space by Olan Rogers. It wasn't always the greatest comedy, but it had heart and I found it endearing.

It's a movie series set in an old timey fantasy world so it's not going to seem dated the way an 80s movie like The Breakfast Club or even Ghostbusters might seem dated.

That said I don't entirely buy your premise about freshness if by that you mean quality. I'd say Ghostbusters still holds up much better than the majority of modern hollywood movies even if it used a different style of film stock and different special effects.

It doesn't seem dated because it was one of the first movies to digitally alter the color palette. 80's and 90's movies have a natural palette because they were done on film.

Modern movies have a blue/orange palette, which is full display in House of the Dragon. It's as awful as that green/red two strip Technicolor used in the 1930s.

Same as with endless Spider-Man reboots.

And turning a single book (the hobbit) into a trilogy of movies.

Cash grabs.

Spider-Man is kind of a special case, though. It's pretty much an essential part of the Spider-Man universe that the main character and all his friends are teenagers, so if you're going to make new Spider-Man movies you have to start over with new actors every few years. Tobey Maguire was (IMO) the best movie Spider-Man, but he's 47 now -- it'd be hard for him to play a high school/early college student. :-)

Contrast with something like Batman, where the main character isn't any one specified age. You could probably get away with a Batman who was anything from mid-20s to mid-40s, or maybe even older.

To be fair, movies from the 80s look like movies from the 80s. Film stock has a lot to do with the visual look. But other things like the sound effects of weapons, the crappy car chases/wrecks/explosions add to just how 80s films stand out. You can tell a move from at least 2000s from the vast amount of CGI. Let's not forget about the wardrobe and hair styles. And the smoking.

LotR has to be acknowledged on how well it was produced regardless of how one feels about the treatment of the story itself.

Definitely some of the most beautiful (I blame New Zealand) movies ever made.

In general, I thought the movies were amazing in all aspects except the writing. The casting and acting were good, but the writing diminished everything else, but at least we got the "And my axe!" meme out of it.

>Definitely some of the most beautiful (I blame New Zealand) movies ever made.

I had a job that sent me to New Zealand for what turned out to be a pretty amazing time. I almost didn't come back because I liked it so much. I had no idea where all I'd be visiting on the trip, but part of the assignment took me to a lot of the locations used to in the film. One place had one of the chairs they used to help sell the forced perspective of having a normal size human look small and was a photo-op. The trip took me into the woods, up to the top of mountains walking on a glacier where the water hadn't been liquid for tens of thousands of years (or some such). Haven't lucked into a job assignment like that ever since.

Purely on visuals side of things:

- Tron released in 1982: one of the first movies with extensive use of CGI

- Terminator 2 released in 1992 with first partially CGI character and realistic CGI human movement

- LOTR in 2003 had it's own important firsts like AI driven CGI characters in massive battles

There have been advances since, but not comparable to TRON to LOTR jump. Another important factor is that a lot of effects were practical and not CGI and those will always age well.

The fact that it's sort of a period piece for a period that never existed helps. Fantasy is handy that way. Aside from the trends around color grading and film stock, much of what gives the visuals a sense of being of a specific time are choices around clothes, hair, and makeup.

> When I watched LotR, I was around 20 myself, and a then 20 year old movie (which would be an early 80s movie) would seem like a movie from a completely different era to me.

The first LotR movies was released in 2001. If you go back 20 years, that is 1981. Which is the year Raiders of the Lost Ark came out:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark

That still would have seemed fresh in 2001 (and still does now).

Plenty of other notable movies in 1981 as well:

* https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1981&title_type=feat...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1981

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_in_film

Peter Jackson's offering is beloved because it (largely) respected the books.

I watched the Amazon offering. I won't criticise the visual spectacle of settings like Numenor, nor much of the acting, but the writing was just uniformly terrible. What a disappointment.

Is this likely to be any better?

The Ring was better than the later trilogy in my opinion. It was written good enough. Produced pretty fine. Way too good for a series.

And better than The Hobbit. That should have been one 3 hour movie or maybe two 2 hour movies. But it was greed and slop when they made it three.

The also tried to make The Hobbit the Lord of the Rings when they are complete different in tone and style. I wish we got to see Guillermo's version.

The Hobbit also had the fingers of 4 or 5 studios in it.

The Hobbit had too many endless Disney theme park rides in it.

And sexy dwarfs, too many sexy dwarfs.

Not only did it largely respect the books, they invested an astronomical amount of effort into things other filmmakers call minute details, such as making real chainmail instead of the 3d printed garbage used in the Amazon series. Or sending gardeners to the Shire years before shooting even started, to plant the hedges... End result is that everything looks convincing and most scenes in the movies aged very well.

I don't think we really need more LotR. I'd prefer studios pick up other fantasy properties.

The lack of a good Earthsea adaptation is kind of depressing and it makes more sense than ever to take another crack at it given Hollywood's newfound commitment to racial diversity in media.

It's the same for sci-fi. We have a million Star Wars series and movies, a billion Star Trek series and movies. But we can't get anything else that is out there that could be so much better. Dune was a good start, but really, each of those books is a series on its own.

The Culture series by Iain Banks would be amazing, especially considering that the world is way more accepting of race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender issues than it has been historically (not even to mention that we could use some hope for the future in our media instead of dystopia constantly). But instead we get baby yoda series 3. (for reference, I do like The Mandalorian, I just felt like being snarky).

I would give up my neural lace for a well made Culture adaptation, but I do worry that any adaption wouldn't do much justice to the politics in the book except in the most shallow way possible. Still, though, a dose of utopianism would be nice.

> We have a million Star Wars series and movies

Star Wars is an interesting case.

It went from a franchise making money on every movie to a mix of ok movies and flops. I know a lot of people (including me) just tuned out with the latest trilogy.

Correlated with Kathleen Kennedy being put in charge of the property. The franchise has flopped so badly that they have not only had to cancel movies, they've had many big name directors pull out because they don't want to be associated with the ongoing carnage.

The only bright spot left is what Filoni or Favreau are doing.

Only one Star Wars film "flopped" and that was Solo. The sequel trilogy each grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office.

The films and series that have been produced since the Disney acquisition a decade ago have created an entire new generation of fans and spawned theme parks, hotels, cruises, merchandise, and spinoffs... it's been an amazing success for the franchise.

Blade Runner, Avatar, Ender's Game (which sucked, but still), Aliens movies/Predator movies, Edge of Tomorrow, Matrix movies, Star Trek movies. There are plenty of "not Star Wars" examples out there, some of which are extremely successful.

We could have more of Middle Earth since there's plenty of material. The problem is TV/Film written and directed by committee that has to dance around the stories that Tolkien actually wrote in the world as he built it since his estate has never sold the rights to the Silmarillion and the History of Middle Earth.

That's really why the Rings of Power sucked. The company wanted 10 hours of content and paid nearly half a billion dollars for it. But budget can't create story and characters where there are none and the writers have to work around the appendices of a book.

It's the same fundamental problem as the Hobbit trilogy. That could have been a fantastic 100 minute film.

Not having license to the Silmarillion isn't why Rings of Power sucked. Rings of Power sucked because the world was not believable, the plots were not believable, the characters were not believable, the societies were not believable, and at every possible opportunity, the writing team went for what they thought would be cool or flashy instead of realistic and believable.

https://acoup.blog/2022/12/16/collections-why-rings-of-power...

That's exactly my point... the writing was bad. They didn't have enough content to stretch out, and had to fill it.

A film trilogy made from one children's book? Certainly felt "thin and stretched out, like butter spread over too much jam".

Earthsea also has plenty of material. It may be too refined for Hollywood, LeGuin's writing is on a whole different level. The only decent adaptation was "Lathe of Heaven" (1980).

> I don't think we really need more LotR.

Especially if it’s being made “for a modern audience”. Sic.

If those phrases are used during the promotion, that’s a 100% guarantee I won’t be watching something.

Meanwhile, the books sit on my bookcase safe from the hands of studio executives and tell the same story every time.

You can also keep the 2001-2003 LotR trilogy DVDs in your bookcase and they won't change either

I have them in my bookcase, the extended editions, but I will probably just grab a well-regarded unaltered copy from some torrent site when I introduce them to my son in a few years. Of course, should that prove impossible by that time, I do indeed have the DVD's.

Middle earth about to have the demographic makeup projected for America in 2050

People go around daydreaming about what book/movie/TV show they'd make if they got the chance, and writing it all in their head. Then some of them do get the chance, and it turns out to be a big hit. People start thinking of them as a good writer/director, and ask them to make something else. But they had twenty years to write their first thing, and only one year for the second. So it flops.

This makes it hard to turn valuable intellectual property into a hit. Previously succesful showrunners won't necessarily be able to pull off the same trick twice. There's a person out there with a perfect LotR spinoff in their head, but WB can't find them.

There are people who can churn out multiple hits, but they all know how much they're worth.

Reminds me of a quote I heard regarding a rapper with a disappointing second album- “he had 19 years to put into that first album”.

We have really reached "peak content".

Is this going to be in the modern style, with lots of "Epic" shots, slow motion and explosions ?

> Is this going to be in the modern style, with lots of "Epic" shots, slow motion and explosions ?

The first trilogy had a lot of moments like that already (except slow motion)

There were slow motion moments in that trilogy, like Aragorn's dramatic reappearance at Helm's Deep after they thought he was dead.

Yes, and don't forget the non-stop epic music so you don't forget you are watching something epic

My guess, this has been thrashed to death already and work with this content will result in capturing only the die hard enthusiasts and not be a wide ranging success.

Movie Studios, imo are failing, even my kids have started saying there's nothing new. Time to stop thrashing ideas and start creating new ones again.

But then again, I'm probably wrong...

Feels similar to me as well. Everything is a reboot of a reboot, nostalgia for the sake of a cash grab, very few big studios are taking chances on new franchises anymore.

My take away is that article says Warner Brothers has a killer lineup this year of blockbusters.

Then when I look at the list in the article there are zero new movies in that list that aren't:

- Sequels

- Remakes

- Adaptation of Existing IP

I mean that's horrible, not one new original story film.

Wrecking LotR is just an example or symptom of the terminal disease the studios have right now.

Wow yeah please give me more woke nonsense reboots to perpetuate the demoralisation

And now Hollywood moves to kill the greatest story of them all. We've ruined superhero movies, destroyed Starwars.... onto Middle Earth.

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