Of course the making of movies is a business - a big business with a huge downside of having to risk millions of dollars. sometimes over a hundred million dollars. Any film company which is not cognizant of the business side of the process will not stay around for very long.
I cannot take issue with the idea expressed that New Line Cinema is looking for revenue and certainly has not found it since ROTK left the theaters in 2004. COMPASS simply is not passing the test and will not be that revenue stream for them. Of course, the next Babe Ruth never is.
I am not as down on the business as others here seem to be. I accept it as a money making business and do not hold that against them. So is the book business and the publishers of JRRT certainly know how to milk something over and over again to keep those presses printing dollar and pound notes. Thats fine. If New Line wanted to fiendishly explot LOTR to the tune of making Saturday morning Merry and Pippin cartoons they certainly have had four years to attempt to do that. They have not sunk that low.
There seems to be an attempt to take the higher road of feature films in the spirit and feel of LOTR. YES YES YES I already know that Gimli doing fart jokes is not necessarily the higher road. No postings necessary about that. But in the continuum of motion picture quality, LOTR was fairly over on the higher quality side of that scale.
As I get older I get more pessimistic about nearly everything. One big reason is you realize that there are no real answers to the Big Questions you had as a youth. Heck, if you really become down you realize that there are not even any questions either. But I truly love the Middle-earth of the books as written by Tolkien. I have for the last three and one-half decades. I also have loved movies for even longer and love the LOTR films. It would be nice if this same old scene did not play out the way it appears to be playing out with all sides doing just what is predicted by convention and habit.
Five years from now I do not want to be engaging in a debate with davem and WCH about the lack of purity in THE HOBBIT films. And I certainly do not want to read how the filler stuff Jackson put because he was barred from the fuller more descriptive material was rubbish. There is opportunity here and I would love to see it actualized.
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