From: http://www.theonering.net/ and http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/201 ... -22375892/



All i can say is: noooh

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Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

if they made the hobbit, the movie would be so succesful.

if they made it as good as LOTR.

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"I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor...though I do not know the way."
—Frodo, at the Council of Elrond

Is anyone surprised?

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"War does not determine who is right, only who is left."
- Bertrand Russel

No, but still....

Noooo!!!

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"Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone"

The daily mirror story offers nothing new, official or concrete that James Bond or the Hobbit has been canned.

Seriously people, this is a rehash.

The more serious trade papers have been reporting that the next Bond movie has been suspended. Basically MGM is four billion dollars in debt, and no studio wants to buy MGM (and its rights and production infrastructure) with that debt attached.

And since MGM is already bankrupt or close to it, they can't get funding to make the movies already in production (they apparently have movies they have made, edited and post-produced that they cannot distribute, either).

If the Hobbit is to happen it will be because someone buys the rights (likely Warner/New-Line) to the thing alone and transfers the whole mess across. The issue with that is the Bannkruptcy court or the trustees might want A Serious Amount Of Money for those rights.

So yes, the Hobbit will make a lot of money (likely not as much as Lord of the Rings, and likely not as much as they would have had it come out five years ago), but nothing that will seriously dent that 4 billion dollar debt.

Gavin

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Dreaming of getting back to painting...any month now.

Like I said, the original post where the news is reported has nothing new to report since we already knew that Bond was suspended.


Here however is some actual news.

Good news, even it is just a tiny bit of good news:
http://heatvision.hollywoodreporter.com ... obbit.html

That article was somewhat hopeful, but I'm going to be completely honest here; I wouldn't be suprised if they simply canceled the project. It reminds me of the time a couple years ago when my friends and I were going to make a little short film. We had the script, the actors, the locations, and the dates, but when it finally came time to film, do you know what we were missing? The camera! Seriously. We had done so much work up to that point that when we finally realized that we had no camera to film with, it was like, "This isn't worth it. It was a fun idea, but in the end its ultimately a waste of time." I certainly don't think that about The Hobbit, but I get that sort of vibe every single time I read an article about this film. There's a lot more at stake in a feature film than in creating a short film for fun. So I wouldn't be suprised if they stopped, just very disappointed.

I think something a little less important is the fact that for years, most LotR gamers have put their trust in the fact that the range would continue on slowly but surely until The Hobbit films fully revitalized it. If The Hobbit films never come along, how much longer will GW support the LotR range?

with wotr now itll b supported for a while i here there is going to be expanded beyond lotr and bringing out silmarilion stuff and apparantly a official fall of gondolin book

Where did you hear this? I don't think GW has a license for anything outside the 3rd age.

I think GW would make a pretty obvious announcement to the world if they were able to secure a greater license. The only official things they can produce outside of the TA are that which were shown/discussed in the films (and likely the books though none of us are obviously not 100% sure without seeing the agreement ). So we can get Gil Galad because of the prolog in the FotR, for example.

With the material available for earlier periods I think a good company could make some interesting things. But I don't think GW is the one to do it for us. The reason I say this is because they already have an issue with "power creep". In order for anyone to spend lots of money on new models, they generally had to either offer something very new or very powerful. So you started to see a situation in SBG, for example, where the average Fight value of base troops went up by 1, or more models with a better Defense.

Now in Tolkien's mythology the forces of earlier Ages are greater in strength than those later. So earlier Elf lords and warriors would need to have a much better stat line than those of the TA. So now a whole new bar would be set where (for example) Fight 5 for common warriors is typical and Fight 7 for greater Heroes may not be uncommon. Since GW has never shown a willingness to prevent lists from different time periods interacting (and in WotR even threw out any controls that prevented mixing models from different time periods in the same force ) I put no faith in them not creating a situation where all TA armies are pretty much nerfed by earlier forces.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

I think this may be the most likely reason we will never see a game or movie based on the Silmarillion and other books based on the History of Middle-earth series:

http://www.squaremans.com/?p=21

Also, GW have stated as matter of public record that they have literary rights as well as movie rights of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit (not to be confused with the rest of the literary works) to reproduce miniatures for their LotR wargames and are even granted a bit of creative license (pending approval) of certain non canonical characters in order to expand the game for reasons of game design. (Druzhag, Durburz, Kardush, etc)

No need to see the agreement because they have stated it in print. If they are lying then its fabrication and they would be sued.

Hence why we have Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, barrow wights, etc. in miniature form.

GW will not, never, forget it, get the rights to anything beyond the text of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings and elements of the Appendixes. That's because no one is allowed use these things.

GW has managed to get some movement from the Tolkien Estate with some minor details (eg, Khamul). They will not get such movement with the Silmarillion, the Children of Hurin or any other such sources.

GW till-monkeys do have a habit of repeating these rumours, however

Gavin

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Dreaming of getting back to painting...any month now.

Why is that? Is it a general policy of the Tolkien estate, some last wish of Tolkien himself, or is it just that it's never happened before?

Matt Colville only worked in the gaming industry concerning LotR licensing. Its not like he knows what he is talking about or anything like that....

Ah, somehow I missed that. Good article, thanks!

What is such a bummer about Jackson is New Line Cinema's Exceutive said "we will never hire peter Jackson for a director position again. (This was b/c he sued them for some unpaid checks he earned in his contract)

Now with the director walking off, it would have been so cool to see peter take on the project.


A bit of studio history: New Line Cinema never pays there bills and try's to horde all there money. There a horrible production company. So i hope Jackson sued for every cent he could.