Three Times The Hobbit?

[Alcidas]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I'd like to see stats on how membership of sites like this took off following the films, and I suspect it would have boomed. And I don't know of any members here who first came to Tolkien via the films who disregard Tolkien's writing, quite the opposite! And in the UK, one unexpected bonus has also been the boom in SF literature, TV and film. The films may have made SF 'cool' or it may be that media types realised that the geek market was huge and hungry for more fun, but I strongly suspect that we'd have been without the Doctor Who revival or series like Being Human and Life On Mars without that sea-change.

I think Tolkien's writing is more than strong enough to weather any mere film

Very good point. I have been "into" the fantasy genre from the time I first started collecting Conan the Barbarian comics in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 90s, fantasy was not widely popular, and you did not have the kind of large-scale interest in it that there is nowadays. I think the LOTR trilogy did increase interest in the fantasy genre. Yes, there are problems with the films, but they are certainly of better quality than most other fantasy films out there.