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Originally Posted by Nerwen
If you don't mind my saying so, I think that's a bit of a strawman,Leaf. [...]
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I don't mind at all. But I hope you believe me, when I tell you, that my goal wasn't winning the argument by asserting false statements. I merely chose this wording for the sake of shortness and clarity (and to be a little bit polemic about it, I must confess).
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Many, many people have argued that the "Hollywoodification" was a commercial decision- often this is expressed in terms of "selling out". If anything, I'd say that's the most common view.
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Yes, many people have argued that. However, those people mostly applied this notion to the most obvious excesses, like Tauriel, or the fact that the Hobbit was split into three movies. My original concern was to argue, that this problem roots deeper and affects more plot points, than just those obvious characteristics. Take the examples I gave a few posts ago. Those aren't things that PJ or the Screenwriters simply overlooked, misjudged or misunderstood. I find it hard to believe that the problem was the lack of ideas or a 'vague memory' (even though the result may feel this way). I'm thinking this way, because those things are relatively easy to spot and even easier to implement in the movie. If they wanted to only have a short appearance by Smaug, they could have done that. If they wanted to make Bilbo the real protagonist of this story, they could have done that. And if they wanted to have the dragonslayer appear, without a convoluted backstory, they could have done that as well. But, clearly, they didn't want to write the movies in that way. Instead, they chose to strip the story of those unconventional motifs.
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However, these movies were practically guaranteed a large audience- they could have afforded to take a few risks.
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Guaranteed by whom? Common sense? Personally, I think you are right, but one might want to have a little more assurance if you're handling a budget that size. The
Hobbit trilogy's budget was more than twice as big as the one for all
LotR movies. And even if one would accept that
a large audience is
practically guaranteed, you can always earn more money.
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There's every reason, however to think PJ & Co weren't all that enthusiastic this time around; what I'm saying is, that's also a situation in writers turn in hackwork.
Not that it's entirely one thing or the other, of course- Tauriel is pretty blatantly there for commercial appeal.
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You are right. It most certainly is a mixture of both elements. And as I said before, we can't prove or check the motivation behind those decisions anyways, which makes this discussion moot.