pretty much 90% of all the CGI tentpoles I've worked on over the years, minues the ones that won Oscars for VFX

It seems they didn't give him much of a choice. People in charge of the finances on creative projects seem about as bad at understanding finances as they are at understanding creativity.

From what I understand of what was going on behind the scenes, MGM being short on money lead them to make a lot of REALLY questionable decisions on various projects, including the Hobbit trilogy, which lead to a bunch of this stupidity in the first place.

So it's one of those 'brought it on themselves' situations.

Also: Jesus Christ. I mostly enjoyed the first in the trilogy, stomached the second somewhat, and felt like my soul was rotting when I watched the third, particularly once the actual battles started; all this, while I'd been defending Jackson against various diehard Tolkein fans that'd been badmouthing his movies on the internet up to that point. This explains how it turned out so badly, I guess.

Bobonne: Those were my exact reactions to the Hobbit movies.

Everyone kept ripping on the first one, and after watching the second one I thought "Wait.... was my initial reaction just kneejerk-fanboyism?" But no... the first Hobbit movie is really enjoyable. (Mr. Testicle-Chins notwithstanding)

This was a massively profitable film - almost a billion box office agaisnt 250 million budget. The "failure" of it is critical quality but it did well.

I said it before but I couldn't stand the mostly-greenscreened sets, which took away from the natural beauty of LotR. This helps put it into perspective, and I'm not one of those purists who still prefers Ray Harryhausen and practical special effects in favor of what modern technology can bring to the table for modern movies, but this just seemed like kinda shitty CGI compared to a lot of movies I'd seen that were made years and years earlier.

But some of my favorite movies don't have the best special effects, like The Host. The monster looked cool, but didn't fit in, but it was such a cool story that I didn't care about that. It could've just been a man in a suit like Toxie and I still would've loved it. And I still don't understand why you'd try to stretch a 300 page novel into a 9 hour trilogy, adding characters and plot devices that were never there, like Tolkien would've wanted it this way, implying that The Hobbit was some unfinished work and here comes Jackson to fix it..

If I remember correctly, most of the added stuff was in the book.... just off-screen. The addition of Radagast, Dol Goldur, and so on was all pretty cool.

The problem (in my mind) were the interminable action sequences. Seriously, we don't need 40 minute fight scenes. They get old, no matter how much whimsical invention you add to them.

I had an intuitive understanding of why this might be, and I checked the numbers to be sure.

The Hobbit grossed 2,932,490,211 USD on a 745,000,000 USD budget.
The Lord of the Rings grossed 2,917,506,956 USD on a 281,000,000 USD budget.

So by excising the superfluous "quality" that you are all on about, the producers increased their ROI by a factor of almost three!!! Not only that, but the gross actually _increased_ by a couple percent.

Opps, hit the send button too quick. They spent three times as much money on the dog, but the gross didn't move much. That's bad financing alright but it didn't much affect the box office returns. Good or bad, people dutifully went to see it.

So this movie was basically a fever dream for you?

Sounds about right... you got the full experience.

My wife and I couldn't make it past the death of Smaug a couple minutes in & just turned it off.

Hey you're in L.A. too?! weird!

SDC glad to know you're alright. A similar thing happened to my ex wife. We were both moderate to sometimes heavy drinkers and one night she smashed my car into several other parked ones, and in lieu of jail time took community service and classes. Luckily I had really good insurance or it would've been a lot worse. Anyway she quit cold turkey and while she couldn't drive all of a sudden realized that she didn't want to be with me anymore and was madly in love with my best friend, because I quit alongside her. So then I started drinking a lot just to piss her off.. bad times for all. But that was like 6 years ago. Sorry for the LJ but it felt goot to get that off my chest somewhere.