Throw Money At It

I’ll be watching Glass Onion, on account of I liked the first one in the series. Netflix blew $450 million on two installments of the Knives Out franchise, presumably because the initial film cost $40 million to make, and did over $300 million box office.

Good luck recouping your investment!

Netflix also shelled out $1 billion with a “B” for The Rings of Power, which is Tolkien content from his sparse writing about the Second Age. I can’t imagine how much The Silmarillion would set them back.

Anyway, as a true Tolkien nerd I’ll say it’s comically off. Not just “hey we’ll edit George RR Martin a bit and Game of Thrones will really zip!” but “we’ll compress centuries of characters into shit that never happened or makes sense and people that never interacted and throw Weta Digital and 20 VFX houses at it.”

Supposedly the Tolkien estate signed off on it but it’s hard to believe. Maybe as a non-Tolkien story it’s fine for some people, but I wouldn’t know as I already know who the major characters are and bring all that baggage to it.
[n.b. I realize you all hate Tolkien, but I love his prose and his attention to detail, layers, and backstory. The Elven languages were created because he felt that gave a “whole cloth” feeling to the stories. For me, it works. I appreciated LOTR more after reading The Silmarillion.]

Pitch Meeting, as always, succinctly captures whatever the hell is supposed to be happening.

5 Replies to “Throw Money At It”

    1. I’m the token Tolkien-hating bastard. Just give me a good story, I don’t need page after page of world-building!

      But I’m counting the minutes until Glass Onion is available. Excellent Rian Johnson Fresh Air appearance here, in which he reveals that Craig is essentially doing his best Shelby Foote impression.

  1. I was going to send Tolstoy over to thump your head with a tome of well-developed characters but GRRM said “hold my beer, also I’ll never finish this story, my God Westeros is too expansive.”

    Great Rian Johnson interview. Especially the part about the universality of helplessness and rage. Made me want to watch Brick. I saw Looper, but don’t remember it well. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Last Jedi, but mostly because Luke felt completely off of the character developed in the better novels, and Laura Dern was weirdly miscast. But it was fun to hear him talk about it.

    You’re right, it’s Amazon Prime, not Netflix. And apparently the Golden Age of Streaming Content is over. Cash was thrown at content in order to capture subscribers and market share, but now it’s about cutting costs however they can. Soon we’ll be back to Movies of the Week on the three major networks, and we’ll all have to watch the same shit so we won’t feel left out or like we missed something. Awesome!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *