It seems kind of weird to characterize Tolkien fans being interested in a new, high-profile Lord of the Rings show as "brigading". Of course the people with the biggest emotional connection and interest in a franchise will be the ones most active in reviewing, creating YouTube videos, and discussing it online. I think the better question is why so many established sci-fi and franchises seem to be alienating their core audience, for example Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Halo, etc.

This is a very astute comment. We are living in some kind of Twilight Zone environment right now. Corporations purchase IP for decades-long, popular franchises, then deliberately alienate their core audience. Then they act as if all these people they just deliberately pissed off aren't real people. Words like "brigading" are a clever way to dehumanize your critics.

I think it just comes down to a money making tactic of making the movie/show available to the widest audience available to increase revenue. In my view it is sad, and basically creates more dull and less interesting cinema. I've been wanting a good HALO movie since the game was released... but I doubt I'll ever get it.

Do these movies make money though?

It seems to me that all these large corporations are more concerned with following ESG than with their own customers. What happens if you don’t follow “the message” we saw with Tesla some months ago.

The new Star Wars films made $2 billion, $1.3 billion, and $1 billion in box office alone (this excludes streaming, DVD sales, merchandise, etc.)

So yes, they're making money.

(I have no opinion on these films btw; I haven't seen them, and only dimly remember the old ones – I never cared much for them.)

Another way of looking at it is that they alienated half their audience in only three movies. They killed one of the most well known franchises for peanuts.

$1 billion in box office is still huge; I wouldn't call it "peanuts". And the box office of the original three films was $776 million, $538 million, and $475 million, so that was quite similar.

Keep in mind that that is pre-inflation. Episode 4 made 1.3 billion adjusted for inflation, with a far smaller moviegoing audience.

The new films are just milking every ounce of life out of the franchise. The money they're making is indeed peanuts to what a talented crew could have made.

My point was just that the pattern (subsequent films had significantly lower box offices) was the same. Comparing box offices from several decades ago is hard not so much due to inflation but because there are so many alternatives to watch something today, and the time from theatre to "you can watch it at home" is much much shorter than it used to be. You really need to compare all income sources, but those often aren't published.

At any rate, the message I originally replied to was "do these movies make money though?", and the answer to that is "absolutely yes!" I don't really have an opinion on Star Wars as I didn't care all that much even for the older films. They probably could have been better (and made more money!), but it's the difference between "making a fuckton of money" vs. "making a shitton of money", so to speak. You don't need to make "the best" to actually make money; "good enough" is, well, good enough.

Applying Occam's razor, given that this process has repeated for years over multiple franchises, the conclusion is that the core audience is not who you think they are. Online commentary creates a strong visibility bias. Reddit is perhaps the most egregious example of this.

Watching it happen over and over, my impression has been that:

(a) Creative leaders (producer, director, writer) hired for these projects chafe at having anyone tell them what to do (and this especially includes the source material!).

(b) Creative leaders hired for these projects are typically not themselves fans, and do not elevate anyone who is a fan to a position of authority, and so lack even an awareness of the material. And critically, an awareness of what current fans enjoyed in it. Which is sometimes a feeling or deeper than just "these specific characters or places."

(c) As big budget projects, and costly rights acquisitions to start with, there are powerful committees put in place to keep creative on the rails, who are even more (a) & (b) themselves.

As a result, there is literally no one in the room with a powerful voice who understands why so many people liked this thing.

Say what you want about recent Marvel & Star Wars, but Feige/Favreau/Filoni seem to have a better sense and balance of "Why did people like this thing originally?" and "What will attract people who aren't fans?"

Welcome to the concept of creative license.

There's a distinction between creative -license and -arrogance.

there is always an inherent bit of arrogance anytime someone reworks the works of the original creator, so i'm still not sure what you're distinction is. just by attempting to update/modify the story signals you think your version is better. arrogance.

If someone is rolling into a Tolkien IP believing they're better at high fantasy than Tolkien, it goes from "arrogance" to "megalomania".

Sometimes it really is best to minimize the artistic license and let the masters work shine through.

There's a difference in several orders of magnitude, to me, in adapting an unknown stage play into a movie (for example) vs adapting Tolkien.

In the former, you could argue your own creative vision might be "better" (in the loose sense), given the lack of popular success of the source.

In the later, it'd be a fair amount of hubris to assume you can make something more beloved than Tolkien's works.

Hubris the size and shape of someone named Jackson? The BBC for making an animated Hobbit? No written tome is ever going to come out unscathed in a TV/film adaptation. Have you seen the Amazon Jack Ryan series, the Without Remorse movie?

Hubris, arragance, etc. You're coming back to words that mean the same thing. Just because it's a work you personally are not familiar does not make it more/less egregious that someone has taken the material in their own direction from the original. It's just that you have a personal connection to the orginal and may or may not like the reworked version.

It's not a subjective but rather objective evaluation -- millions of more people are aware of Tolkien lore than... something off-Broadway.

That's why Amazon paid $$$$ for the rights.

It's unreasonable to ignore that and claim that taking the same amount of artistic license with Tolkien is the same as taking it with something else.

It is objectively different to adapt a more popular and well-known work.

There are some people for whom the name Tolkien means something, usually something very specific and beloved.

If those people aren't the core audience, why did they pay out of the nose to use that name in the first place? They could do a fantasy story written all in-house, and save themselves the money. If you're right, the audience should be almost as big, and they get to skip the part where they're accused of grave-robbing.

No, Tolkien-lovers aren't the core audience. Every casual viewer that enjoyed or have heard of Lord of the Rings are. Because that groups is about a billion people, not tens of thousands.

Like me, I enjoyed the trilogy. I don't care if this new show isn't in "the spirit" of Tolkien (judged by someone far after his death, how much does that even mean?), I'm gonna watch it because I've heard of the IP before and want to try it out.

For Rings of Power, I think the show itself is very confused on who the "actual audience" is. They tried to go after each segment, but the writers lacked the kind of skill and finesse needed to actually perform that miracle. (Which is possible, just really, really difficult.)

Every casual viewer I've spoken to is very meh on the show.

Do you really go around talking about "the IP"? Then you're in a far smaller, far weirder minority than Tolkien fans.

No, I used the same language as parent comments.

What a weird way to dismiss my points..?

I don't see how it is not possible to make good product for both. That is the fans and general audience. Appeasing the later is pretty low bar. Instead it seems that shows are aimed at the vocal non-fans at social media.

It's definitely possible - the original LotR movies succeeded at this. Fans had big lists of criticisms but despite that largely loved them.

The opportunity cost is there to prevent that, and the tastes of the fans don't always coincide with the general audience.

I don't think that is true. There is some complaining, but in general popular franchises are popular for reason. There likely were enough things that appealed already substantial audience. Just keep those in and adapt what has to be adapted for different medium.

I'm not saying make a product for only the fans. But stay honest to source or previous material.

Ockham's Razor doesn't apply in adversarial situations.

We know the big operators purchase these franchises (economic wrappers around fictional universes) to pursue profit. They modify the stories and characters to optimize profit, they've been doing it for about a century, and they're very good at it.

The evidence doesn't back you up here. The Rise of Skywalker made half as much money as The Force Awakens. Rey and Rose Tico merchandise didn't sell. Viewing figures for recent Disney Marvel TV shows have been extremely low. Star Trek Discovery can't be viewed in many countries because no network broadcasts it. Netflix's attempts at woke series tend to get cancelled after the first season. And so on. The poor performance of woke entertainment products is visible for all to see.

I think it's best explained not by ideology as such, but by self-handicapping. If you're facing a hard exam that you have no idea if you can pass no matter how hard you try, you can study hard, and risk the humiliation of failing... or you can kick back, relax, do a little partying, do a little mildly illegal drugs. Then if you fail, you can say you weren't really trying, you didn't really care that much. And who knows, you might even still succeed, and then you get the satifaction of being so good you didn't even have to work hard!

For a modern Hollywood director, if you put in just a little obnoxiously "woke" stuff, just a pointless gender or race swap, or maybe make someone gay or trans who wasn't in the source material... Now if it fails just for being bad, you can claim it failed because of those handful of people who complained about it online.

So it's not that the "woke lobby" has that much power to force directors to "cast diversely" or something, it's just that it's a convenient excuse for everyone involved. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, and nobody ever got fired for making a film look a bit more like affluent modern America.

It has fuck all to do with "wokeness", and a lot more to do with current production values just not resonating.

Most media today looks the same, over-reliant on digital postprod and fuck all practical effects.

It also tends to just keep recycling the same properties ad nauseum, getting worse each time.

People are, frankly, bored of it.

I would argue that the problem is less due to franchise fatigue than it is to low quality and needlessly confrontational writing. Classic drama tends to have a universal quality to it that transcends any particular time, place and culture, and it's this quality that has been lacking in woke entertainments from the last five or so years.

Take Squid Game for example. I don't speak Korean and know next to nothing about Korean society, yet its core story about a group of people in desperate circumstances being forced to constantly reevaluate what they're willing to do to survive resonates with me just as well as if the show had been set in any other country.

Compare that with The Rings of Power, where Galadriel is portrayed as a perfect warrior woman whose biggest source of antagonism is the weak and unprincipled men around her. Or She-Hulk, who has to explain to Bruce Banner that men telling her how to do her job makes her a better Hulk than him.

Young progressives lap this stuff up but it leaves everyone else cold, including many women. In years to come, these stories are not going to be loved. These films and TV shows are not going to top any polls. The characters are rotten, unlikable and will not live on in anyone's hearts.

Alienating fans doesn't mean you can't also alienate and bore the general audience as well. It's definitely true that wokeness heavily contributes to some of these failures, but the alienation of fans is not exclusively about wokeness to begin with, nor is wokeness always the main driver of mediocrity. Consider boxing matches that now revolve around YouTube stars, and the most recent Diablo's financial success.

The point is that vocal fans who demonstrate their wrath or joy online are a very minor part of what makes a production succesful or unsuccessful.

I'm sorry, "deliberately" alienating the core audience? How exactly are they doing that? It's an enormous, expensive rendition of mostly-obscure Tolkien content. How's that supposed to upset a fan?

Because from a economical business point:

* You're getting old and your not spending as much money. * Getting 5$ from 100.000.000 people is better than getting 50$ 1.000.000 people. Especially if you can do it at lower costs. * Getting in new audiences to keep the franchise alive and healthy * And last but not least the average consumer is not interested in it being "true" to some kind of book or whatever. It has to make sense, but not in a true to the original author kind of way.

The problem is the low effort part not the "not being true" part. If you take a result of decades of loving work of some author and give it to a committee to remake it in 6 months (and people in the committee were chosen by some random criteria like genitals or pigmentation) - you get low quality product with big budget.

Then you blame people who understand what was lost for complaining and call them racist.

Few people have problems with changes for the better. But the changes are usually for worse. In the Witcher season 1 most changes were well received (introducing Yennefer backstory for example). But removing the Ciri & Geralt scene which was the pinnacle of the 2 short stories collecting just so that they can put 30 minutes of Ciri walking with that black elf that has no influence on anything else in the story was just dumb. Pacing was awful, and they had to cut the good stuff.

The story got objectively worse, but people who didn't read the books won't complain cause they don't know what they missed.

1. Older audiences have more money and spend more of it.

2. There’s only 68 million Gen Z compared to 72 million Millenials.

3. You keep a franchise alive and healthy by protecting the core IP and making the fans happy not by alienating them and making terrible renditions of the story. If you do that then all you have left is a name that is increasingly associated with bad writing and acting and eventually it becomes a joke that no one will turn out for.

> Older audiences have more money and spend more of it.

And one way to make them spend that money is to target their kids, which is much more easier to do so ...

see everything star trek after star trek enterprise

From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.

Today I saw physical adverts for House of the Dragon on the train ride home. The only thing I thought about was how shit the last season of Game of Thrones was and how I will never read any media about that world again. Even though I would have watched a new show set in a completely different world with the production quality I saw in the posters.

Currently Big Corp is spending billions on acquiring IPs which rather quickly end up having negative value. This is, to put it mildly, not good business sense.

It truly is bizarre to watch. It reminds me of the ethically questionable business strategy of buying a premium brand, slashing prediction quality and costs, and then raking in profits before people catch on. That strategy is viable because of cost-cutting though, while many of these franchises are setting records for production costs despite their mediocre quality.

All of these strategies make sense given the financial environment we live in, with a money supply that constantly increases via debt creation. There’s something like an arms race for attention. The combination of this arms race and unlimited financing means we have production costs for for one hour of entertainment in the tens of even hundreds of millions.

I think good art comes from individuals with fantastic visions; but since no individual can fund things at the scale to compete in the attentional arms race, we are left with endless bland re-hashes since these compete on existing brands and thus are lower risk.

>From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.

There are probably more than 10x as many people who remember liking the lotr movies as a kid than who are close enough friends with a member of that fanatical core of Tolkien fans to have the show personally recommended to them and probably many times again as many people who are just generally aware of the popularity of LotR. That's the real benefit of the IP. Having some really dedicated fans help hype it up for a few weeks/months before it comes out doesn't hurt, but their job is pretty much done by the time it actually releases.

How well is the Star Wars franchise doing these days?

You wouldn't believe it, but fantastical.

I think they also buy these IPs for the cultural impact. With these massive brands like Star Wars/Marvel/Game of Thrones, people get a strong sense of FOMO because they know everyone else will be talking about the new show or movie and they don't want to be the only one who hasn't seen it. These names are so big that they influence pop culture, and that's why media companies are paying huge sums for them.

That only works for so long. It's burning money for warmth instead of spending a bit of time to buy firewood.

Pareto tells us that 0.1% of people account for 38% of the money.

Intentionally aggravating your most passionate fans is a moronic business plan — like a mobile game that intentionally pisses off the “whales” to pursue casuals.

Likening a passionate fan to a whale does not work for me. A whale spends thousands to ten thousands times as much as a casual, but a passionate fan does not spend orders of magnitude more than a casual. A business analyst can only see this first-order effect as money is easy to measure; the second order effect of the passionate fanbase having a larger-than-usual reach and being to organise mass gruntle/review bombing/boycotts and other forms of IP burning/resistance is invisible to him, or he does not care because the cost is already sunk, whereas whaling is always an ongoing business.

The exact shape of a Pareto distribution depends on two or three algebraic parameters. And the Pareto principle isn't some universal law that applies everywhere.

Sure — do you think it’s likely or unlikely to apply to things like profit per customer in media? …do you think the distribution will be significantly different than mobile games?

Are you objecting to the general idea that highly engaged customers produce disproportionate impact — or just those specific numbers?

If the latter, okay… but that doesn’t address my point that it’s a bad business plan, just quibble about it.

Because it’s not the core audience.

People who care about the lore and source material are insignificant compared to the amount of people who just enjoy a lavish production in a medieval fantasy setting.

Clearly Amazon is targeting the people who enjoyed the movies and want a similar experience in a TV show format. Most don’t really care that it conforms to what Tolkien wrote. Heck, I’m probably unusual compared to the average watcher in that I have actually read LotR and the Silmarillion as a teenager and I don’t care about fidelity to the source material.

I hate to do the "pull out the dictionary" thing, but those people are precisely the core audience for LoTR media (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/core-...):

> the type of people who are most likely to buy a particular product, watch a particular TV programme, etc.

The Tolkien fans don't need a dozen Amazon Prime adverts to watch a new LoTR show, they seek out new LoTR content on their own.

To give my perspective, I also read LoTR as a teenager, but did not finish the Silmarillion, and enjoyed the Peter Jackson trilogy. It doesn't take a LoTR lore researcher fluent in Elvish to realize that Jackson set the bar high, and the new show appears to be falling significantly short. That's just the reality of trying to adapt a beloved franchise with excellent predecessors. The 1/10 reviews might be hyperbolic, but it's ridiculous for Amazon to be removing them while leaving the equally hyperbolic 10/10s.

I think that even by your definition the core audience is people who enjoyed the movies and watch prestige TV shows especially when you consider the marketing campaign. That’s the people Amazon is targeting. Fans of LotR as a universe are a very small subsection of that.

It does not look like prestige though.

Call it like you want. I meant that it’s a TV show with a production budget of 60 millions dollars an episode without counting the rights purchase. It can’t really be compared to a traditional show.

This season is going to cost twice as much as the original three movies. That’s completely insane.

It's entertainment and the entertainment factor is what gets measured.

Fargo had 10x less budget and was much more entertaining.

Then why spend the money to get the rights to a known series at all? Make up a new IP in Generic Medieval Fantasy Land with lavish production values. No licensing or contract renewal fees, and you don't upset any existing audience.

Because the movie trilogy was extremely successful and is associated with great production value by a whole generation?

Don’t get me wrong I wish Amazon had the courage to just put 500 millions of dollar on completely new IP but that’s just not how American entertainment companies work.

For Lord of the rings, it's also wise generational timing (akin to Star Wars episodes 1 and 7).

The Fellowship of the Ring (film, 2001) is just over 20 years old, which creates, now, 25-45 year olds significant childhood nostalgia, just in time for them to be able to show their ~5-15 year old children (in their most formative years)

Have I watched this new LotR show and their WoT show? Yes. Because I've enjoyed the books.

Would I watch a generic IP they invented? No. At least not until it got huge and I got it recommended by others.

Is that really true? If I saw any fantasy or sci-fi series that didn't derive from a book or comic series I'd take off work to binge it. I'm so tired of regurgitation. A known writer's name attached would me me run rather than walk to the remote.

It's really true. How often do you hear about Upload, an ongoing non-adaptation scifi series run by the guy who produced The Office and Parks and Rec? Or The Orville, a non-adaptation space exploration show from the Family Guy guy?

Upload got good numbers. Stranger Things was extremely successful. I remember a period when everyone was talking about Dark a few years ago. Original stories can be extremely well received with the right marketing push.

Upload is brilliant! I talk about it at work, but I confess no one has ever spoken to me about it. You may have a point. Is it a sunk cost thing, where having spent the money on IP they market it heavier? The Norwegian thor on netflix was really good too. But its low buget so I figured they just don't push it as hard? Why do people really care that much about name recognition?

The problem with changing the world that was created by a writer is that the world had become so popular for a good reason.

I didn't read Dune nor Brave New World, but I loved the Dune movie and didn't enjoy Brave New World series, because it just didn't make sense. I love exact book adaptations even if I hadn't read the book.

Another issue is that whoever they're hiring to write these adaptations either have no clue how to write, or are hamstrung by committee direction. You can make, quite effectively in fact, a story set in the same universe (cue all the Star Wars material that exists as books in the fandom) that has nothing to do with the original story. But it needs skill. Skill that they cannot seem to find.

From that perspective, it’s a small step to start considering anyone who doesn’t enjoy the show as “not the target audience”.

Best to just let all reviews stay, it opens up a massive can of worms if you don’t (never mind the conflict of interest in why LotT gets a different treatment than, say, HBO’s shows).

If that were true then why buy the LotR franchise rights?

Major studios are terrified of taking a risk on an unknown IP. That's why they keep snatching up IPs with established audiences. I can't wait until that attitude changes. There are plenty of small, unknown authors who wrote excellent series.

And then the studios are approaching each adaptation as a committee instead of as a visionary. It's writing-by-committee instead of writing as an individual.

Because many of the studios think that big budgets and flashy effects can cover for nonsensical plots, mediocre acting, and characters whose choices do not fit with who they are.

And frequently these mediocre writers roll into established franchises and actively make editorial decisions as if they're the reason were watching e.g. LotR. Newsflash, Tolkien is a far better writer than whoever is on Amazon's payroll, probably best to just stick to his ideas whenever possible. If you want to innovate you'd piss less people off doing a mediocre job in a brand new universe.

They are not alienating their "core" audience - they were never the major target audience.

The reason why most of the Marvel TV shows, Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, Halo etc. all appear to be "dumbed" down is because the target audience are teens and young adults. It's the "catch them young" tactic - all these streaming services are competing to get teens hooked to their streaming services. The next gen spend more time hooked to their screens than our generation. And we "oldies", having seen tons of shows now can't be so easily thrilled with a new show. But even if a show is a damp squib, teens can still be excited by certain elements of it as it will be a new experience for them. Generate the right emotions, and you have them hooked ...

This is like saying Wall-E or Inside Out are dumb movies because they need to hook young audiences.

It's not an either or situation here. Shows can be written to target many, many groups of audiences. They can be "smart" while still appealing to the masses.

Also, it's not so much dumbed down as just terrible acting and terrible writing. Cinematics are great, but cinematics are the only thing that's great.

Not dumb but "dumbed" down to target a certain age group. And I agree that they can try to be "smart" but there's the practical aspect of it - they are competing hard with many streaming platform (and many will fail by the time this industry stabilises) and talent is at a premium, thus the obvious compromise to go for the easy and more assured targets.

Tolkien’s legendarium isn’t a “franchise”, brigading is the work of trolls not fans, and the degree to which it panders to an existing audience is the most tawdry, and least interesting, measure of any creative work.

Reducing OP’s argument of “alienating fans” to “pandering to fans” is a logically false and intellectually dishonest argument.

It is simply the other side of the same coin. The actual intellectual dishonesty on display is the suggestion that an identifiable “core audience” exists, and can be alienated at all.

I don’t agree at all.

Emotionally invested fans of these stories clearly exist and describing them as the core audience isn’t a dishonest claim. Neither is it dishonest to claim that some of these fans feel alienated by the new versions of these stories.

You can debate both claims, and my views don’t align perfectly with OP’s either but there is no intellectually dishonesty on the the part of the OP in making the claims.

If someone self-appoints themselves as a “core audience” and then complain when the creative output doesn’t meet their self-appointed in-group demands, they are not fans, they are over-entitled whingers.

Suppose the show had been extremely faithful to the source material and hordes of Tolkien fans had reviewed it well. Would similar logic apply? That their good reviews should be deleted because they would be mostly useless to the broader audience?

If they don't care about the source material, then a story about Prince Cabosiam and the Dragons of Krongar would be just as fine. When someone pays to use famous names or famous stories as source material, then that's because that's valuable, and then it's self-evident that faithfulness matters.

People love Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, Legolas etc. and want to see more of them.

People don't give a crap if any new story is "faithful". And judging faithfulness is subjective anyways, who are you to say the adaption is wrong?

> People love Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, Legolas etc. and want to see more of them.

> People don't give a crap if any new story is "faithful".

These two statements contradict. The net effect of it not being faithful, is that it doesn't feel like the Aragorn, Legolas, Galadriel etc. you knew. The casual fans will notice too, just a little later and maybe less consciously than the more dedicated fans.

No. People love an old wizard in grey clothing. They don't give a crap if some lore said he beat 1 Balrog but in the show it was 5 giant orcs or whatever. Casuals have never read the background material, I just want to be entertained.

If that was true, as I told you, then there would be no reason to pay for the "IP". You can have an old wizard in grey clothing for free.

Nah, you're missing my point.

Oh no! Those pesky Tolkien fans!

Maybe don’t call it a Tolkien adaptation if you’re bothered by Tolkien fans? Just call it “generic fantasy movie with elves and shit”, and Tolkien fans will leave you alone.

The "blame the fans" trick coined by Disney. at least they are not calling them manbabies.

I set aside any/all gripes about canon before I started, knowing what I was getting into, and what got me was the poor quality of costume design/production, and the absolute garbage CGI that looks like videogame cutscenes.

It's called lord of the rings. Not lord of the woke and flops.

They could have started a new saga with whatever setting they wanted but they picked a story with a (strong) legacy.

Strong legacy comes with strong fans. Since they don't live up to the legacy they deserve (rightfully) to be mixed with dirt.

Maybe, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that they are removing the negative reviews for that reason.

>the show is not faithful to the source material.

I think it actually is pretty faithful to it. There is not a lot of sources for the 2nd age from Tolkien and they did a great job with what was there.

Most of the bad reviews are just trolls screeching about some political agenda that is completely ubrelated to the show.

not sure if accurate because i know nothong beyond basic LOTR story but saw something that said if they were faithful to the source material nothing of interest would have happened until the middle of the 5th season

No, they really skipped over a ton of the first age. With the second age, I think it'll come down to pacing. There are a number of notable events that quite literally reshape the world from the end of the first age to the beginning of the 3rd.

The writing in it is pretty terrible though. Hopefully gets better.

"Tolkien Fans" might be painting it a little broad, how about "a vocal subset of fans".

As for source material, there isn't a lot of source material on the Second Age. Also original movie trilogy didn't always stick to the source material.

I have trouble making sense of your comment.

I believe people would like the ratings of a show to reflect its quality and be somewhat informative. Brigading by a subpopulation with vastly different interest to the general public interferes with that and that legitimises removing their reviews as far as I’m concerned.

I'm not sure Tolkein fan's have a different interest than mine.

I've never read the trilogy, and thus the only reason I'd invest time in watching this series this weekend is because I've heard it came from good source material.

If it's not faithful to the source, then it's just on the same level as unknown author to me and I'll watch it when I find time... months from now, or maybe never.

There is very little direct source material to speak of; The Hobbit and the LotR books take place much later, and the The Silmarillion and some other works take place much earlier. There are some notes and references here and there, but it's not much.

Overall, I feel that's a good thing because this way you can both incorporate aspects of the original canon yet also have some freedom to do your own thing, kind of similar how The Next Generation taking place almost 100 years after the original series gave the writers some freedom.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's actually any good. The first two series of TNG were notoriously bad (with a few exceptions) before it finally got on the right track and actually started making good stuff.

>If it's not faithful to the source, then it's just on the same level as unknown author

Yeah, kinda pointless to buy IP, only to then hire producers that don't understand what made the source material good.