Buying Middle-earth: Amazon Dives into the Tolkien Legendarium

For some time now, it has been known that Amazon Studios is going to be working on a television series to run as an Amazon Original series based of Tolkien's Middle-earth novels. When the news first broke, it looked like they were merely going to rehash The Lord of the Rings, and possibly The Hobbit. It was assumed that JRR Tolkien's son, Christopher, who headed the Tolkien Estate, would never allow the rights to any other writings about Middle-earth. However, as details came to light, it became obvious (to me anyway) the series was going to be much broader in scope than that. As I wrote in my article for Screenfish.org, 

According to the Amazon Press Release, as published on TheOneRing.net, “the television adaptation will explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The deal includes a potential additional spin-off series.” This places the series directly in the Middle-earth universe, and, yes, potentially includes material from The Silmarillion!  What exactly will be included is only speculation at this point – beyond the fact it is about Middle-earth and is set before Bilbo’s famous Party.

Reports have been stating Amazon will be spending upwards of a billion dollars on the series, including about a quarter billion just for the rights. With Christopher Tolkien retiring from his position with the Estate, the rights to stories beyond The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were secured – apparently after a bidding war with other studios. (See the Variety article from last November.)

When the film industry spends that kind of money on a production, you can be sure Forbes will, sooner or later, comment on it. Yesterday morning contributor Paul Tassi weighed in on the project, but he does not seem to understand the breadth of Tolkien's Middle-earth Legendarium.

Peter Jackson’s follow-up trilogy is pretty bad. This demonstrates what happens when you run out of source material and have to stretch what little you have to work with into something larger than it should be. The Hobbit trilogy pales in comparison to the original LOTR trilogy, and if Peter Jackson himself couldn’t make the concept work, I’m wondering what chance Amazon has without him, and almost no source material to work with at all, given that everything else has already been adapted to death. They can have a world with Hobbits and Elves and Orcs and power rings, but they have no roadmap, they’ll have to make it all up unless they re-adapt the original books, which seems like an even worse idea. Even Game of Thrones had George RR Martin’s books to follow, and Amazon seems like it’s on its own arduous path to Mordor, with peril lurking around every turn.

First of all, Peter Jackson's latest trilogy did not garner groans from the fan base because he ran out material. There is plenty in the novel he chose not to cover. And Gandalf's side trip to Dol Guldur is mentioned in Tolkien's writings (more cryptically in The Hobbit, more explicitly in Appendices of  The Lord of the Rings). Jackson's sextet is not weak, in my opinion, because he ran out of good material to use, but, as I've said elsewhere, he didn't trust the material.

The Lord of the Rings movies are, in my opinion, at their best when they trust Tolkien. They get into trouble when they don’t. As I expected, in this first Hobbit movie, Jackson only trusts Tolkien to a point. He is a fan, but he is not a believer. Not that Tolkien is infallible, or that he cannot be improved upon. But Jackson has not proved, at least to my mind, that his version of Middle-earth is better than that in the books. He has two more movies to show me I’m wrong.

But, if Amazon's original Press Release is correct, the series is not going to be about the adventures of Bilbo and Frodo anyway. As I point out in my quote near the beginning of this piece, the material being used will most likely include The Silmarillion. Certainly there is plenty of "source material" to use.

Let's just hope whoever writes and directs this mammoth series trusts Tolkien more than Jackson did. If all goes well, sometime in the 2020s we shall see.