Insisten🐲t that IP butter should always🔴 be scraped over too much bread, .
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lord of the Rings movies were made at the perfect time. Like Titanic a few years earlier, Peter Jackꦛson’s trilogy was the perfect handshake between incredible practical effects and well-deployed CGI. Those movies, and James Cameron’s romantic epic, still feel huge in a way that basically no movies being made today ever do. When you watch LOTR, you can sense the reality of what Jackson shot on the day through the use of extensive sets, forced perspective, miniatures, size doubles, and other practical techniques that were then further complemented and expanded on with CGI.
When Jackson returned to Middle-Earth a decade later for the Hobbit trilogy, the tech had advanced enough that he needed to do very little practically. He’s still a stellar director, so there are sequences worth seeing in all of them, but they feel smaller, sludgier, and less tangible than the Lord of the Rings movies in almost every way. In the eight years since The Battle of Five Armies, big-budget movies have come to rely on CG more than ever. Great movies like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Top Gun: Maverick and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: The Way of Water have impressively blended CG and practical effects — seriously, watch some of the behind-the-scenes footage for Avatar if you don't think they did anything practically — but they’re the rare exceptions. The MCU’s recent movies and the upcoming Flash film look significantly worse than what Jackson and Cameron were pulling off two decades ago.
I’m not especially encouraged by Amazon’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lord of the Rings: Th൲e Rings of Power. Despite loving Jackson’s trilogy more than basically any movies ever made, I got three episodes into The Rings of Power and was too bored to continue. Its characters just weren’t interesting, which was thrown into sharp relief by the messy Targaryens getting up to soapy hijinks over on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:House of the Dragon. In its effort to cover territory the movies hadn’t covered while still giving us character🦄s we knew, Rings of Power ended up♏ with the worst of both worlds.
All of this makes me wary of new Lord of the Rings movies. Will they tell the same stories as Jackson’s trilogy, adapting the books again? If so, given the studio system's current approach to big-budget blockbusters, they will likely be pale imitations of what Jackson pulled off. Or will they attempt to find interesting stories in the rest of Tolkien’s material? Either way, I don’t think Hollywood in its quest for endlessly milkable IP will be able to come close to what Jackson and his collaborators managed 20 years ago.
Those Lord of the Rings movies were united by a clarity of vision and purpose. They were a self-contained trilogy, not the beginning of a gambit to pump out Middle-Earth-flavored content forever. They were, famously, all filmed simultaneously over the course of a shoot in New Zealand that went on for over a year. They exist because Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh were passionate about the books being adapted, not because a studio wanted to keep fans invested in the future of its IP. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a passion project that had the good fortune o🤡f having huge amounts of money thrown behind it.
New Lord of the Rings movies will not be any of that. They will exist because, "Huh, we own this profitable property. We should probably do something with it." Warner Bros. and New Line may find an excit☂ing director, but Hollywood has rarely been as bad at making exciting movies.