Middle Earth Ranger Forum

I saw this over of Sword Buyers Guide and thought many here would be interested:

https://www.facebook.com/TheFallOfFingolfin

Looks very cool, but I wonder if the Tolkien Estate is going to let it go forward. They've become much more aggressive lately regarding fan films.

They are normally smart enough to let fan films slip through the cracks.

So far, none of the major fan films have tried to make money off of their productions, which would be why they went through okay. You can't even buy a copy of them to play on your home TV. The day Born of Hope was uploaded and made public, we connected our laptop to the TV so we could watch it on the bigger screen.

Someone was going to do "A Storm over Gondolin" fan film and got a 'cease and desist' letter and had to rewrite it substantially into a non Middle-earth fantasy, "A Scarlet Dawn." I think "Born of Hope" got under the radar because no one at the estate/its law firm was looking for such projects to stifle at the time.

http://middleearthnews.com/2013/12/08/f ... en-estate/

They could potentially sue fans who make films that they don't sell at all. They have better lawyers than most fans.

Honestly though most fan films are done out of love and have a more...focused way of showing ME then Jackson and to be frank here it hasn't been till the Hobbit that things go the way they were there. I mean I didn't hear the estate complaining when ROTK took best picture

As I recall, the Tolkien Estate was very unhappy with the original trilogy. I can't imagine that they hemmed and hawed too much about Fellowship, but with all the changes made in TTT and RotK, I heard they were more than a little nonplussed.

I don't think that estate realizes how much it somewhat owes those films in a sense. There was a whole generation of new readers of his works because of the films believe it or not. There's countless fantasy novels out there now but if a younger reader has seen these films they may be more inclined to read these books for the first time as they know the subject matter and won't feel too totally unprepared.