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Comment by Finbel | Hacker News Reader

Always wondered why Rings of Power have 84% critics score but just 49% audience.

One important factor is that the critics score is binary in a sense: if all critics agree that the movie was "passable but not great" then Rotten Tomatoes still gives it a 100% critics score.

The website explains it clearly enough I would say.

Because critics get paid, whilst audience have to pay.

I didn't like the idea that my money had paid for such a disservice of my favourite book, so it pushed me to cancel my Prime subscription that had been ongoing for years. I don't buy nearly as much on Amazon these days as a consequence.

I rarely get angry about bad content but RoP felt like a personal affront. I love Tolkien's world and the people who put RoP together did so with not just ignorance and incompetence, but some kind of malice. They intentionally butchered Tolkien's writing and world. This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, the better approach.

> but some kind of malice

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence :)

I bet the RoP team are great content creation professionals. They obey all the rules of their craft.

They also do not care about the material at all, otherwise they'd be script writers and directors, not content creators.

> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.

That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.

Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.

It's fair to point out the difference re Faramir but I feel it is rather small and inconsequential. He ultimately made the same decision in both the book and movie. Again, I am not contending that no changes were made. A movie adaptation requires changes. I'm claiming that the changes were in service to the material, lore, world-buildings, themes, and messaging. The RoP writers thumbed their noses at all of that.

To me that feels like sacrificing a detail to service the larger story, which when you're trying to fit three whole books into just three movies might be necessary. In RoP they made many changes nilly-willy, missing most of what made the source material great.

I am annoyed by Rings of Power, but at least we got some fairly passable (if still very flawed) adaptations from Peter Jackson. I'm more salty about Wheel of Time, because that trashed the source material just as hard, and because it bombed it's unlikely we will ever see someone try again with an actual good adaptation.

> Report says PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews (screengeek.net) 254 points by mc32 on Sept 7, 2023

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419427

Critics often score based on first few episodes to be released in, and never revisit the score. And if it's shiny/ expensive (and RoP was both) and seems like it might lead somewhere, they risk ridiculing themselves by being too critical.

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