[…] Recently I mentioned that Peter Jackson will not be doing The Hobbit. Today User Friendly has posted a brilliant comic accurately capturing my worst fears regarding that movie: […]

This is also why so many of the Hollywood productions these days are remakes, and adaptations of books, comics and games.

When you make a movie based on a known and respected brand you buy yourself a built in audience. The fans of the original will go to see your movie.

If you are promoting an original work, then you brand it with the name of your leading star. Then you get the built in audience of fans of that actor/actress. But to get big stars you need to have big funding – and so you must fall back on some sort of branding again during a studio pitch.

If you are pitching an original movie must brand it via association with other blockbuster. You must pitch it as the next Matrix, or the new LOTR and etc..

But if your idea is completely original and so innovative, it is hard to compare it to anything and then you are shit out of luck. It’s a big risk, and no one wants to spend few millions on a movie that is not guaranteed to succeed.

And thus we have the current Hollywood culture of recycling and reuse. Anything that is new and original is risky…

sad but true – a good label would sell even the suckiest most manure-like crap

hmm.. kinda like something I was looking at as research for sociology coursework about post-modernism whereby reality is replaced with simulcra and the labels attached to things become more meaningful, and more “real” than the object itself

e.g. when you buy clothes the brand name can add more to the price than the actual physical item that you buy

Yeah, I’m sure that a sucky, made-up prequel would still make a lot of money because of the LOTR branding. Kinda like SW prequels did.

Once you establish a really strong brand (SW, LOTR, etc..) you can milk it for quite some time producing total garbage before people catch on and abandon it. Look at George Lucas – if he wanted to he could easily make 3 more Star Wars movies and all of them would still be huge multi-million blockbusters.

Prequels sucked ass, but we still got excited for them, and we still went to see them. Seriously, if Phantom Menace was an independent movie, not associated wit the Star Wars brand it would surely flop. But since it had SW branding, it was a huge success despite the fact that it sucked ass. I predict the same happening for LOTR movies – no matter how bad they turn out, they will still make millions.

well that sure sucks..
if they come up with some stupid pile of bull thats loosely based around Middle Earth then there will be a lot of people pissed off by it, the real article is too well known for them to completely get away with it like has been done with some “book to movie” deals

not that this would prevent it from happening…