Lord of the Rings TV series gets multi-season order at Amazon

[Boromir88]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

They got Tom Shippey working on this? There's still hope...

Indeed. It appears hes representing the Tolkien Estate to make sure Amazon follows the copyright agreement, which is more strict than I realized.

They're limited to strictly Second Age material and if it's an event that Tolkien wrote about they can't alter the canon. They'll still have to invent a lot of characters and names to fill in gaps in the timeline. But I'm now expecting something closer to the LOTR movies adaptation and not The Hobbit.

The LOTR movies had a bunch of problems of course, but I've always felt on the surface, it was Lord of the Rings. There was little to no depth, scratch the surface and it wasn't Lord of the Rings anymore, it was PJ's "interpretation." The Hobbit movies were straight up fanfic that I didn't recognize any of them belonged in "Middle-earth."


So it appears they won't be able to do something like smush together several hundred years of history, like in The Hobbit where they have the Azog surviving the Battle of Azanulbizar and being at the Battle of Five Armies. Which thankfully means, I don't think there could be any Legolas appearances, or you know something like Haldir showing up in Numenor with a company of Elves (since Legolas and Haldir are Third Age material).

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

So it appears they won't be able to do something like smush together several hundred years of history, like in The Hobbit where they have the Azog surviving the Battle of Azanulbizar and being at the Battle of Five Armies. Which thankfully means, I don't think there could be any Legolas appearances, or you know something like Haldir showing up in Numenor with a company of Elves (since Legolas and Haldir are Third Age material).

Excellent news about Shippey. I wonder if they are going to bring in Frank Herbert's son when they once again import sandworms from Arrakis into Middle-earth.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

Which thankfully means, I don't think there could be any Legolas appearances, or you know something like Haldir showing up in Numenor with a company of Elves (since Legolas and Haldir are Third Age material).

Since they are elves, it could be argued that they might have been alive in the Second Age...

[Boromir88]

Well drat. (The news about Shippey leaving the project.)

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Since they are elves, it could be argued that they might have been alive in the Second Age...

Well, actually my reading of the copyright is it's much stricter than that.

Yes, they could make the argument, they're Elves and therefor 'could' be alive in the 2nd Age. But my understanding is since Legolas and Haldir don't appear in the canon of the 2nd Age material at all, so they can't be added in. Elrond and Galadriel do are specifically mentioned to be involved in the 2nd age events, but not Legolas.

Although, they can invent new characters. I don't think there would be any stopping to just cast Orlando Bloom as "Les-galad" the son of Gil-galad.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

Although, they can invent new characters. I don't think there would be any stopping to just cast Orlando Bloom as "Les-galad" the son of Gil-galad.

My understanding is that they can do pretty much anything that doesn't contradict the established canon. There's quite a bit of leeway there for GoT envy to play.

[mhagain]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

My understanding is that they can do pretty much anything that doesn't contradict the established canon. There's quite a bit of leeway there for GoT envy to play.

Yes, I believe that's fairly explicitly specified.

I don't know about this next bit, but I would assume that "can do anything" is defined in such a way that "if we catch you doing anything like what happened with the Hobbit movies, even if it doesn't contradict canon, we're pulling the plug" is something that can be done.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

This is looking worse and worse and worse. Now we hear of JJ Abrams' (indirect) involvement, doubtless advising the completely inexperienced showrunners...

And then there's the casting call for extras "comfortable with nudity," together with the hiring of an "intimacy coordinator."

This will be to Jackson's movies what Caligula was to I, Claudius.

https://www.theonering.net/torwp/202...ke-on-tolkien/



[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM4x__ZzeOg[/media]

[Kuruharan]

In his own words to his publisher he expressed the desire for his overall Legendarium to be presented as “‘high’, purged of the gross.” That’s from his famous Letter 131.

As suspected, this is probably going to be more of "gross, purged of the high."