[Anguirel]

It's interesting and revealing how this casting cycle has gone

The Lord of the Rings films - while I would say only the first two are particularly personally enjoyable for me, and they not as much as they might have been - were, in retrospect, quite respectable; visually impressive, quite well acted, script that avoided bathos more than it didn't and quoted quite a lot of Tolk, etc. And look at their cast. They were not a lattice of famous names arranged like a meta-joke. Most of them are famous now, but that's different

Because of this quite originally and insightfully cast series of films' very success, though, the Hobbit is proving exactly the opposite; its cast seems to read like one of those hilarious dream teams created by someone like me on a site like this - a collection of colossally famous, shoehorned in half remembered dramatic walking cliches; the product of a bloke somewhere working on autopilot, not an artist looking for talent

Am beginning to wonder if the magnitude of The Hobbit's disastrousness is actually a conspiracy to shore up the lasting reputation of the trilogy...

I can't for instance see it being anything like as good as Game of Thrones mentioned just above - and given their respective literary starting points that's quite shocking. Note Game of Thrones is also mostly relatively new blood in its casting