Disaster! Warner Bros. Hires New Writer for Lord of the Rings Mid-quel: Steven Colbert

Good heavens, what an absolute disaster.

We have the Hunt for Gollum coming up, directed by Andy Serkis, who just remade Animal Farm as a pro-socialism, anti-capitalism message movie.

And now Warner Bros. has hired this absolute assclown to write a draft of what is being called "The Shadow of the Past." The concept of the movie is not terrible: A good part of Fellowship of the Ring was cut out of the Lord of the Rings movies because of time restrictions and also because it contains the character Tom Bombadil, who is just a big ball of plot questions. Like, given that he has godlike power that makes even Gandalf and Elrond envious, why doesn't he just take the ring? (Tolkien's lame answer: Because he's flighty and would eventually just forget about the ring and let it go back to Sauron.)

The reason this section of the book is worth possibly making a movie about is the creepy, scary encounter with the Barrow Wrights. If you know, you know.

So Colbert, I guess, pitched the idea of doing these four chapters of LOTR as a stand-alone mid-quel movie.

Couldn't they just have said "Yes that's an okay idea, here's $20,000 as a finder's fee, now fuck off"?

Instead, they've given this poisonous troll the job of writing the movie.

It's what I call "strip-mining the IP." New Line Cinema purchased the rights to The Lord of the Rings almost 30 years ago, and did them such glorious justice with the original movie trilogy. Inevitably, Jackson and New Line set about extracting every last bit of wealth until the original property looked like the Shire after the Scouring.

What's it called when the greedy mining company takes the tailings from its strip mine and runs them through the smelter one more time with all the reckless abandon of Gollum diving after the One Ring into Mount Doom?

Ah, yes -- it's called The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past, and lame-duck late-night host Stephen Colbert will co-write it with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, for Jackson and Warner Bros, which now owns New Line. Variety reported late Tuesday that Colbert, "a vocal Tolkien fanatic," and McGee will write a screenplay "from chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that didn't make it into Jackson's 2001 adaptation."

Here's this absolute piece of shit gloating that he conned his way into the gig.

I for one will not be seeing it, even when additional writers are hired to rewrite Colbert's shoddy script -- and again, I think the basic idea of doing these four overlooked chapters is a decent one.

Actually, it's half a decent idea: You can't do a whole movie about a single encounter with the forces of darkness, and one that is resolved without violence just because Tom Bomdadil sings. Yes, he's so powerful that his songs drive off the undead creatures stirred to unlife by the Witch King.*

That's not a movie. That's a long Tales from the Crypt episode.

They could instead do a two-part movie called, get this, "Lost Tales" (another Tolkien title), and do both the Barrow Downs encounter and the much-demanded "Scouring of the Shire" battle omitted from LOTR. Neither of these segments is long enough for its own movie, but packaged as a double feature, sure, why not.

But I don't care either way, because I will not support Steven Colbert nor anyone who wishes to inflict this hateful prog Gollum on me.

If anyone is doing the Hobbit/LOTR challenge with me -- starting the books today, "Tolkien Reading Day," so-called because the ring was destroyed on March 25th -- I will get in at least a couple of easy-breezy chapters of The Hobbit. I would read more, but I have to finish a Miss Marple novel, The Caribbean Mystery, and I have about 70 pages left of that. So I'll only be able to get a little bit into The Hobbit. (Don't worry, Agatha Christie is fast reading. It's no Hound of the Baskervilles.)

I think I'm going to do a post about The Hobbit for Friday -- did you know the book was partially rewritten and Tolkien did a major in-universe retcon of it to make it fit with LOTR?

Here's some better news in genre entertainment: The egregious woke Gay Klingon In a Skirt nightmare (and I'm not kidding about that detail) Starfleet: Chocolate Starfish Academy has been cancelled.

The show will end after season 2, and if you're wondering "Why give them a season 2?" -- it's their new way of doing things. Rather than commit to a 20 episode season, they now say we're committing two "two seasons of 10 episodes each," which is really just one season split into two release windows. So "season 2" -- really season 1b-- was already contracted for and paid for and I think they're even already shooting it.

But after that -- donezo.

Fuck you, colonizer.

See, the media knows this crap show was bought for a run of 20 episodes to be divided into two seasons, but when the studio wants to plant a story about how successful the show is, the media claims a second season has been greenlit based on the strength of the first -- but that's a lie, the original order was 20 episodes. No further episodes were ever greenlit, the show was not "renewed."

But they lie anyway:

* One thing you notice when reading LOTR is that Tolkien doesn't like violence and doesn't enjoy writing battles or valorizing war. He does when he absolutely has to, but if he can get away with it, he completely phones in any narrative about how a battle went. For example, after Aragorn raises the Army of the Dead -- the army of ghosts -- we never actually see them in combat. Ever. We only hear of them second-hand when Gimli or Legolas (Gimli, I think) quickly sums up the ghost army's defeat of the Umbar Corsairs in conversation with other characters. After the battle of Minas Tirith is over.

Aragorn just shows up with a bunch of men for the fight with no ghosts. (The ghosts left his service after freeing captured men and sailors from the Umbar Corsairs, and it's these freed men who actually appear on the Pelennor Fields to fight the orc army.)

So after the Army of the Dead is raised and you're sitting there thinking "Oh man, this is gonna be good...!" What you actually get is "Fuck you, the ghosts are already gone. You missed them, fatty. Now go fuck yourself in the face, jerkoff."

He does this a lot. The fantastic end battle of Fellowship, where the Uruk Hai kill Boromir and kidnap Merry and Pippin? Also only told in retrospect by a dying Boromir. It's like three paragraphs told in retrospect by a dying man who doesn't exactly have a lot of breath in him to tell an exciting tale. A lot of the time, we don't see battles. We just hear about it later. Not gonna lie, it's pretty deflating.

I realize I'm not making a good case for reading these books.

They're good, seriously. Just... a lot lighter on actual action than you might be expecting.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:10 PM

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