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[Liber celi]

Who, or what, where you?

Living in the Old World has its advantages

[LordBucket]

LotR showed me that Tolkien's stories are of a kind that modern Hollywood storytelling
tropes and audience demands simply cannot respect.

Personally I don't relate to how much reverence they're given as it is. The LotR books haven't aged well. The fantasy genre has evolved, and I daresay...improved over the past sixty years those those books were published. I enjoyed Fellowship well enough, but the Two Towers bored me. It was like 100 pages of interesting things happening and 300 pages of people walking.

I thought the movies were a vast improvement over the books.

[GreatJustice]

LotR showed me that Tolkien's stories are of a kind that modern Hollywood storytelling
tropes and audience demands simply cannot respect.

Personally I don't relate to how much reverence they're given as it is. The LotR books haven't aged well. The fantasy genre has evolved, and I daresay...improved over the past sixty years those those books were published. I enjoyed Fellowship well enough, but the Two Towers bored me. It was like 100 pages of interesting things happening and 300 pages of people walking.

I thought the movies were a vast improvement over the books.

Likewise.

Return of the King was more annoying, though, in that the dramatic final confrontation occurs about halfway through, and the rest of the book is a fight against the ultimate bad guy's junior partner and some chump back at the Shire.

[Lectorog]

I'm going to see The Hobbit. It seems to have a nice tone, from what I've seen. If it's good, then I've spent the time well. If it's not good, I'll have more reason to like Tolkien. Nothing to lose but some money.

[XXSockXX]

LotR showed me that Tolkien's stories are of a kind that modern Hollywood storytelling
tropes and audience demands simply cannot respect.

Personally I don't relate to how much reverence they're given as it is. The LotR books haven't aged well. The fantasy genre has evolved, and I daresay...improved over the past sixty years those those books were published. I enjoyed Fellowship well enough, but the Two Towers bored me. It was like 100 pages of interesting things happening and 300 pages of people walking.

I thought the movies were a vast improvement over the books.

That's easy to say if you didn't grow up with the books or if they weren't the first fantasy you read. There would not be a fantasy genre without LotR, at least it would be very very different. That being said, of course the genre has evolved and while there is a lot of derivative crap, there are also some very good books. Still I think nobody every created a world with that much depth, mostly because nobody works on something like that for his whole life like Tolkien did.
I like the movies for what they are and I think for what one can expect from adaptions in general and from hollywood movies in particular they are quite good.

[alway]

LotR showed me that Tolkien's stories are of a kind that modern Hollywood storytelling
tropes and audience demands simply cannot respect.

Personally I don't relate to how much reverence they're given as it is. The LotR books haven't aged well. The fantasy genre has evolved, and I daresay...improved over the past sixty years those those books were published. I enjoyed Fellowship well enough, but the Two Towers bored me. It was like 100 pages of interesting things happening and 300 pages of people walking.

I thought the movies were a vast improvement over the books.

Likewise.

Return of the King was more annoying, though, in that the dramatic final confrontation occurs about halfway through, and the rest of the book is a fight against the ultimate bad guy's junior partner and some chump back at the Shire.

This. The way he was killed off in the movie was an improvement over the original. In the original, it's sorta like "Well, we killed the big bad, let's go home an--- wait a minute... is that the minor bad? And... is he urinating on our doorstep? Oh for the love of... Oy! You there! Shoo! Shooo!" *minor bad scurries off into irrelevancy*

[Thecard]

Huh.  I couldn't really stay awake for the second book or second movie.

[Heron TSG]

It was all supposed to be in one big book, is the thing. That postclimax returning home didn't seem so long as 1/24th of the whole book instead of the last eighth of the third book, and there it showed how much the hobbits had changed since they left their homes so long ago. I definitely enjoyed the books more when I reread them in the single-book form.

[Neonivek]

I'd complain that they are splitting up the movies... but honestly, if it took 10 movies to do it right... then do it in 10 movies.

[LordBucket]

Incidentally I assume spoiler tags are not necessary since this is a remake of a 34 year old movie / 75 year old book.

I'd complain that they are splitting up the movies... but honestly, if it took 10 movies to do it right... then do it in 10 movies.

I suspect the reverse might be the problem. The Hobbit was not a big book, and it was only one book. How are they going to turn it into three 2+ hours movies? The LotR trilogy was 531 + 416 + 624 = 1571 pages. The Hobbit was 310 pages. And they're going to drag it out s much as they did LotR?

That's a lot of filler.

[Lectorog]

That's a lot of filler.

If they fully sing every song in the book, and stretch silences to a point of being awkward but still not entirely realistic, they could easily meet that. I can also see them expanding on some things that were skimmed over in the book, like Elrond's house and most combat scenes.

[Thecard]

Hobbit: The Musical?

[Heron TSG]

Assuming the three movies take only 9 hours, that's not too bad. I read the conversations much faster than they would have been spoken, personally. And there weren't any conversational pauses for effect when I read it. And actions take longer to perform than to read about, etc, etc. It took me about 4 hours to read The Hobbit last night, so just slowing down to half the speed wouldn't be much of a stretch.

[Thecard]

Assuming the three movies take only 9 hours, that's not too bad. I read the conversations much faster than they would have been spoken, personally. And there weren't any conversational pauses for effect when I read it. And actions take longer to perform than to read about, etc, etc. It took me about 4 hours to read The Hobbit last night, so just slowing down to half the speed wouldn't be much of a stretch.

I often find it working the inverse, actually.

[Neonivek]

Assuming the three movies take only 9 hours, that's not too bad. I read the conversations much faster than they would have been spoken, personally. And there weren't any conversational pauses for effect when I read it. And actions take longer to perform than to read about, etc, etc. It took me about 4 hours to read The Hobbit last night, so just slowing down to half the speed wouldn't be much of a stretch.

Ahh yes extended combat scenes.

I suspect the reverse might be the problem.

Indeed cutting content and focusing on what was best out of the Hobbit.

---

I think what makes cutting content a bit hard in this case is the fact that the Hobbit feels less like one adventure and more like a series of adventures done all in one story.

They would, to cut content, just boil it down to the best 2 parts of the book and combine them if you wanted to do it in one story.

Unlike the Lord of the Rings books that had a clear goal in mind and thus knowing what to cut became a bit more obvious.