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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.
I think you completely gloss over why Peter Jackson's original LotR movies were good. It's not that they were shot for shot adaptations of the books. They weren't, though they were close. It's not that they had stunning production values, though they did.
It's because Peter Jackson worked hard to give life to the themes of Lord of the Rings. He probably could have gotten away with the acting being worse, the production not as good, or the casting being bonkers, if he nailed the theme. Luckily for him it was the total package.
This Amazon series is attempting to build on that success, without understanding the themes of Tolkien one iota. It's a dead and hollow thing. And lay people might not be able to articulate that they want their culture to have themes. But they know when someone is putting a corpse in front of them and trying to pass it off as prime rib.
It's definitely not that. Peter Jackson wiped his ass with the themes of LOTR. Things like Faramir trying to take the Ring, or Frodo sending Sam away, are completely anathema to the center theme of the story. Tolkien wrote a story where the Ring was a strong temptation to evil, but there were stronger things still (friendship, or duty), which one could use to resist the temptation. Jackson got the first part, but whiffed hard on the second.
Regardless, though, the LOTR movies are great. They aren't particularly good adaptations of Tolkien, but they are great movies in their own right. That's what the clowns behind RoP (and WoT, and GoT, etc) don't get. You can get away with not being faithful to the original, but your product has to be good on its own merits. You can't just write a half assed TV show and figure it'll be well received because of the IP.
Tolkien wrote a story where literally everyone succumbed to the ring or knew they would except Sam, regardless of their thoughts on friendship, or duty, or... anything. The only form of resistance anyone truly offered was refusing to be exposed in the first place and take the ring. And in the end, what saved the world was not the rising of good, but the self-destruction of evil.
No, that's not the same thing. You're talking about using the Ring, which is definitely something which corrupts. But in Tolkien's world, it's possible to resist the temptation to pick it up at all. Faramir, even when he found out Frodo was carrying the Ring, said "not even if I found it laying by the highway would I take it". He is able to hold strong to his conviction that he must not take up the Ring.
Jackson, on the other hand, felt that it wouldn't be dramatic to have characters who weren't struggling with the temptation. So he destroyed the main theme of the story, all because he thought it would be more dramatic. This is not speculation either, this is directly from interviews on the extended edition DVDs. They felt it wouldn't be dramatic to have Faramir stay strong in the face of temptation, so they changed his character to give in for a time.
So yeah - the movies were good, but it's not at all true that they were good because they respected the themes of the story. They in fact deliberately disregarded the themes of the story because they thought it would be more dramatic.
Yes, the only people who can resist the Ring are people who never use it, and they make sure they can never use it by never allowing situations where they can use it; Gandalf and Galadriel both resist the Ring when offered it, because if they did take it, it would corrupt them.
It's the difference between not cheating on your wife after getting drunk at a company party and not getting drunk at a company party so you don't cheat on your wife.
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