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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.
How much of this is tied to the fact that Amazon got a fairly scattershot group of rights to Tolkien's work?
To me, at least, that feels like trying to bake a cake with flour and chocolate, but no sugar and eggs.
Ahh interesting point. We should just neuter copyright law at this point, the man has been dead for decades.
I kinda want to see the same crazy mashups you get for Cthulhu or Sherlock Holmes.
In fact that's my main argument against the very concept of copyright. We're missing out on so many possible works for essentially no reason.
To hell with canon and rigid control and back to when you could compile random tales into your own new ones and have some cultural evolution.
Hell, LOTR itself was made in this spirit.
How does one look at the current entertainment landscape and conclude we need even more remakes?
The problem with copyright law is (right now) that it benefits corporations even more than the writer who hits it big like Tolkien. And I think it's major corporations that often get the criticism for being bland and formulaic.
Theoretically, if it was equitably removed, you would end up with a situation like we have for zombies : yes, a ton of corporate products since film is so capital intensive.
But there's a chance for original work with the concept cause anyone can use it. Zombie media are all variations on the same concept but aren't all soulless corporate remakes; they run the gamut in terms of budget and even geographic spread (one of the big shows of this recent Korean explosion in pop culture was zombie-based)
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