Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "20 Years On, Lord Of The Rings Will Never Be Equalled" video.
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Oh, I don't know. Look what Avatar achieved, visually. I think Peter Jackson set a very high bar. He was fortunate enough to get a 3-movie commitment out of the gate. He stretched the movie format to the breaking point of darn near 3 hours per installment, but that's as close as Hollywood's business model can probably stretch. With three long movies, the trilogy received a treatment that even Tolkien fans felt did a good job.
There were some things I wanted to see and didn't, like "The Scouring of the Shire." I would have liked it more if it ran a whole 'nother hour or two for the bits after the fall of Sauron. Tolkien went into some detail about Aragorn's ending and the sad story of Arwen's loneliness. I'd happily sit through to the bittersweet end.
So maybe the thesis is correct, at least in a way, because Hollywood is just not built to provide anything comparable to Jackson's legendary trilogy. But I try to look beyond Hollywood as we know it. I think there's still a buck to be made making great movies, and some other business model that's less top-down and more collaborative with more of a profit-sharing approach, where a lot of people can make a decent amount of money putting projects together as more of a team, where everyone stands to make out well if the project succeeds.
Look at how music has become much more of a middle-class phenomenon and how the studio system in music is hitting a wall. It's just too easy to create your own label and keep all the proceeds. A lot more people are actually succeeding in the music business. They're not charting or anything the trades would bother to report on, but they'll have a local following and an Internet following. Maybe they never sell a million CDs, but they're selling something like 10,000, plus whatever they make doing live shows, they're living pretty good.
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