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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Pretty important difference: it prevents Disney from putting $100 million into marketing their own version of Tolkien while he was still writing his.

I think that this is a very weak argument. With a 10-15 year head start, the author has plenty of time to establish their brand, and it would be horrible PR for big movie studio to make a movie against the wishes of the author of a book. Cutting the copyright short is more beneficial to small content creators than big businesses that cannot afford to be seen as exploiters and to face a boycott.

In the case of Harry Potter, the movies were made well within even a 10-year copyright period, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies were made long after, when Tolkien was already dead.

Also, your entire premise seems to be that Hollywood would be able to write a quality work that is not actually using the story from the books and the crucial element of success would be the ability to slap 'Lord of the Rings' on the poster. Yet we currently see that Hollywood fails utterly once they diverge from the books (not just Lord of the Rings, but also Game of Thrones).

I think that a much better argument would be that people can get tired of a fantasy world when too much slop is released based on it.