Middle Earth Ranger Forum

Two half-hour videos that look at what went wrong, including a heart-wrenching interview with the actor who played Oin in the Hobbit films. To hear him talk about the cameraderie of the actors of Thorin's Company at the beginning of the project, and how the 'Dwarvish' Dwarves became highly paid extras while the 'pretty-dwarves' (my term, a riff on Mim the petty-dwarf) became the story, is so sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs

(The Hobbit: a Long-Expected Autopsy)- Lindsay Ellis

That was entertaining, actually. Sad, mostly, but I sat through the whole thing and liked where she took it.

Greg wrote:That was entertaining, actually. Sad, mostly, but I sat through the whole thing and liked where she took it.

I never pondered much over why Del Toro left the project, but seeing this, it does seem like he was booted and the cover story was that things were taking too long and getting in the way of his subsequent projects. And then it looks like the studio went to Jackson and said, "You can direct this, in New Zealand, with your crew of artists, etc. or maybe we'll let Michael Bay film it in Germany starring Shia LeBouef and Damon Wayans. Your call, but you have to tell us by tomorrow and start filming the day after."

And I didn't realize the CGI Legolas/invented Tauriel/Kili the pretty dwarf triangle was all in post-production call backs. You can see that Evangeline Lilly was not impressed.

Given Del Toro's other work, I'm not certain I'd have gone for his vision either.

.. but I can't say the depth and ham-handedness of studio intervention described here gives me much new confidence for the Amazon project. :/

Elleth wrote:Given Del Toro's other work, I'm not certain I'd have gone for his vision either.

.. but I can't say the depth and ham-handedness of studio intervention described here gives me much new confidence for the Amazon project. :/

I love "The Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth," but I suspect Del Toro's "Hobbit" would have been more like his "Hellboy" films, which I didn't really care for. I know that a lot of the conceptual ideas (Radagast as the stoner with guano on his face, Bifur being 'bifurcated' with a hatchet head [hardy-har-har] and Oin ("they listen" in Spanish) being hard of hearing, the stone giants' fight becoming the crumbling staircase of Moria) were all Del Toro features.