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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.
Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.
Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.
But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."
As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).
I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"
Counterpoint #1--Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Was it a 100% shot-for-shot take on the books? No, certainly not, but most of the liberties that Jackson took were adequately justified by the translation in medium. Arwen didn't rescue Frodo in Fellowship--that was supposed to be Glorfindel--but Arwen is much more central to later plot in ways that Glorfindel is not, so tightening the cast there made sense. It's well established in interviews with Jackson and everyone else involved that they tried hard to center Tolkien's vision and leave every other agenda out. The result is really, really good.
Counterpoint #2--The RoP marketing department pulled the same nerd-baiting shit Hollywood has done since Ghostbusters 2016--"the old, male/pale/stale fans are *ist and hate this take, don't be low status like them, give us money." Interviews with the showrunners and actors generate claims that Middle Earth should be "a reflection of the world we live in" in defense of woke casting, or that adding an original character who is the sister of Elendil "brings a feminine energy" to his line. The changes are strictly modern-agenda based, and add nothing in terms of storytelling efficiency or consistency.
I don't think those are counterpoints. Peter Jackson's movies were actually good. They were appreciated even by people who'd never read Tolkien and didn't care about how faithful they were to the books. They would not have been so popular if the only audience was Tolkien fans. Peter Jackson was a good director who cared about the quality of his work, and that resulted in a good product. He was given the freedom to make that product because he convinced the money men that his attention to the work would pay off.
ROP, on the other hand, seems to be trying to cash in on the presumed profitability of woke casting, and failed because the product, independently of how white the cast isn't, just isn't very good. It was short-sighted, but I never claimed the money-men are actually good at predicting what will be profitable.
Good writers and good directing could have produced a good series even with woke casting and fans bitching about black elves. But bad writing and bad directing would not have made a series that was closer to Tolkien's vision good.
This misses the point. Yes, the existing fanbase will care about faithfulness to canon in ways that potential new audiences won't, but what every audience member cares about is some level of verisimilitude--does the story with all its components hang together in a mutually-reinforcing way that captures the imagination? Tolkien is an excellent example of a storyteller who had a clear vision and a craftsman's attention to detail. As Jackson found, if you stick to his vision, all the little pieces fit together better, making the overall narrative and supporting structures more satisfying to the audience. You can make changes, and Jackson did as noted above, but they need to be in service to the story.
"You had one job!"
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