THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Page 9 of 13)

LOTR was a running joke

Sorry I did not want to hijack the discussion regarding Dune but only to comment on the filmmakers choice how they started their movies. But about the Peter Jackson and the production of LOTR.

Over the years I’ve met a lot of industry people from Hollywood. What I’ve gathered from different sources I’ve never really seen written about. The revisionist history has whitewashed the unbelievable attitude and negativity the production of LOTR faced from the filmmaking industry.

Before the movies started to come out The production of LOTR was a running joke in Hollywood. People could not bad-mouth the entire endeavor enough. New Line was going bankrupt, because you know, they were idiots. Peter Jackson was a hack who had conned him self onto a project he was in no shape or form able to complete. Richard Taylor and Weta were a joke in the vfx world. The actors who went to New Zealand were never going to work again and so on.

What I’ve gathered is that Hollywood took the standard “everything I’m not involved in is shit” attitude to another level when it came to LOTR.


Off course when the movies successfully came out nobody recognized ever having said anything but good things.

I remember reading TheOneRing.net religiously at the time when the movie was in production. I was working in a book store at the time and collected all the magazines who wrote about it and read it over and over again. But whenever we would meet anyone connected to Hollywood or the industry (filmmakers working here on projects, technicians from Lucas Farm tuning the THX in movie theaters and so on) I’d hear this undertone of negativity to almost pathological hate. People seemed to have almost psychotic hopes for the project to fail and fail spectacularly.


I’m not saying these people I talked to at the time and later had these views but they told me about how hateful the unofficial discourse was.

Today everybody seem to be on team LOTR and I have the same feelings when I hear them talk as when I see old germans. “On which side were you REALLY on in the old days?”

Last edited by AshDigital (2012-03-16 07:59:03)

Yeah. I've heard Titanic also mentioned in the same vain.

It's interesting the way people's attitudes shift and change about the production. It honestly doesn't surprise me that some in Hollywood wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, because it was such a ridiculously huge project-I mean, look at "John Carter." The only reason that "John Carter"got pushed through was someone at Disney wanted it to happen.
LOTR was fortunate that New Line was crazy enough to foot the bill. Perhaps the fact that the company was going bankrupt that it too the long shot bet on three movies. I think it was Trey who said that New Line bet its future on these movies and succeed-at least for 10 more years.

Middle Earth During the Cold War

Last edited by AshDigital (2012-03-16 17:49:46)

IO9.com ran a nice article on how a movie makes it's money last year.
http://io9.com/5747305/how-much-money-d … profitable

America must be the far green country under a swift sunrise

I listened to them when NPR first broadcast them in the late 70's/early 80's. We had that, Hitchhiker's Guide, Star Wars... for a brief moment in the US, radio was cool!

Towers is definitely the best of the 3 commentaries that day. I wasn't there for the other two. So there ya go.

Just noticed "CM" Lloyd's handle tag.

I use The Numbers: http://www.the-numbers.com/

They post daily updates on revenue a day or two behind. They track box office and DVD sales. I think they lump DVD and Bluray together under "home video" or whatever. They don't track online sales yet as far as I know, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were working on that. That sort of info is much harder to come by because companies like netflix and amazon apparently hate letting people know anything about anything.

John Carter is sitting on $53 Million in the US and an additional $70 Million worldwide. If it can get up to $250 - $300 Million in the US, then they might be willing to make a sequel, but the movie cost $300 Million to make, so they probably assumed that they'd be able to pull an Avatar and make $150 Million in the US in just a couple weekends. Actually, the international gross for the film is pretty decent.

From watching the charts for a few years, the basic trend seems to be that so long as your movie breaks even in the US, then the international and video sales profits are generally good enough to warrant a sequel. The average 'big' movie will usually gross around $30 Million in DVD sales, and big huge hits like Twilight, Harry Potter, LOTR and Transformers and that sort of stuff can end up with well over $50 Million. International box office is generally larger than US box office, but not often by a hell of a lot. Some movies click with foreign audiences better, tho. Some movies fail in that regard.

But I don't buy some of the industry guys who talk about why movies don't get made. Some guy said that At The Mountains Of Madness would have to hit $500 Million domestically in order to make a profit off it's $150 Million budget, and I was like "huh wha-?" Basically it just sounded like Universal saying "We're not gonna give you that much money unless you give us a PG-13 movie. Our balls are too shriveled to take that sort of risk." Which is understandable, given that it's a lot of money, but really... making that movie PG-13 would have the opposite effect that you're looking for. It would be like making a PG-13 version of Predator or The Thing.