Serving animals in HOBBIT film

[Sauron the White]

from Folwren

Why would the recent memory of Narnia ruin it for the audience? It wasn't the animals that made the movie not as good as it could have been - it was that director's deviation from the book - just like the LotR wasn't as good as it could have been, not because of Elijah Wood's acting of Frodo, but because Jackson strayed from the book.

So the LOTR films were "not as good as it could have been" if they only stayed strictly to the books? So if we had Tom Bombadil singing his cheery doggerel dressed like a bad hippie dream, then the film would have
- made more money than the $4 billion US dollars that it did ????
- won more than the 17 Academy Awards that it did ?????
- been more critically praised than the high level that it did ????

I find that extremely hard to believe since by all three areas of industry measurement they were immensely successful. There were things in the book that would have simply killed the films right in their tracks - Bombadil at the top of that list. Try to imagine a 25 minute Council of Elrond with all the various talking heads laying out the expository material for the audience as they figdeted in their chairs.

Please, lets get it through our collective heads --- a book is one thing while a film is quite another. What works in one medium does not always work in the other.