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Notes -
The problem for Jeffy and his Cunning Plan to sell a shit ton of new Amazon Prime subscriptions - if you do new, original stuff, then who's gonna watch it? Those pathetic Tolkien nerds that you're already planning to paint as toxic fandom trolls when the backlash about your changes hits the fan? Pfft, who wants them?
You want the global movie audience, and what the movie audience is most familiar with are the characters Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, the Hobbits, Sauron. So you need those for your show. But you can't remake the movies wholesale, so you do some... re-imagining. Move back in time to when Galadriel was Young Piss'n'Vinegar Glads (ignore that even in the Second Age she was married with a daughter). Shove in Meteor Man (Gandalf, we strongly hint). And Sauron. Make the mystery box thing of "is it him? or him? or them?" about Sauron's secret identity (the showrunners are part of J.J. Abrams pack of second-raters, hence the mystery box).
And thus the entire steaming mess of "we tried ripping off GoT and failed because House of the Dragon ate our lunch".
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