I understand he was pressured into (or to step up in?) The Hobbit after things were already very much on the wrong track.
And he'd been brewing ideas of how to do lotr long before doing it, and never intended to do The Hobbit.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Not a fluke, just peaked very early in his international career. LOTR was only his second big budget production. Name another director who made three movies in a row that are as epic as the LOTR trilogy and made movies that are similar or higher quality afterwards. There aren’t many.
He set himself a really high bar, for sure.
I still have to chuckle when I see the updated cover for Bad Taste
Still have no idea how he managed to score that job at the time.
I don't think it's that big of a mystery. I'm sure it had a lot to do with him trying to turn The Hobbit into a new epic trilogy. It's a pretty short book, it really just needed one film. Also, the first one was terrible to the point that I never bothered watching the other two, and I love LOTR
The hobbit films being a mess were entirely the fault of new line.
The preproduction of LOTR was in the range of 2 years. That's hammering out the script, but also locations, sets, securing extras, apparently all of the horses in NZ for some of the shots but also all of the costumes and armor.
All of those preproduction things were allowed in the range of 6 weeks(as opposed to over 100) for the Hobbit, and New Line refused to budge at all.
That wasn't really on Jackson from what I understand. He originally wasn't even going to be directing the Hobbit films, but had to come in after the original director had other obligations and things were a mess when he got there. I believe the studio had already decided that it would be three films as well, but I could be misremembering.
He could have quit the project though.
My understanding is that he (at least partially) did it so other people wouldn't be out of their jobs. Some of which he might already know from the LOTR trilogy.
Who knows if the project would have continued without Peter Jackson stepping in.
He could've quit as much as you could've started it.
I’m sure it had a lot to do with him trying to turn The Hobbit into a new epic trilogy.
IIRC: He only wanted to do two movies and that was what was originally announced. Then the studio said,if you want our funding, make three.
So we ended up with the hobbit shitshow.
Annnnd, that's why he's not "doing anything" these days.
I genuinely hope he's living his best life. Fuck Hollywood.
Hot take: It's not that LotR was a fluke, it's that it's massively overrated. It's just your standard big-budget American blockbuster with amazing visuals and music that does little more than pay lip service to its source material. I have to laugh when people get up in arms about the character derailment of Luke in the sequel trilogy but nobody bats an eye at Aragorn just straight-up murdering Mouth during negotiations in RotK. I likewise don't get the hate for the Hobbit movies, as if they're somehow obviously worse than LotR. I really don't see it, to me they're just more of the same.
Your hot take is definitely a hot take.
Well, kinda. Yes in the sense that it makes people's blood boil, no in the sense of being poorly thought out due to being hastily formulated. It's been twenty years, I've had plenty of time to think about it.
Yup, few people remember how few and far between big budget fantasy films used to be. Computer graphics have gotten cheap enough now that we see big fantasy sets all the time. Back when LOTR hit it was really rare for someone to cater to the fantasy crowd on the big screen, especially for a whole trilogy.
Much like the original Tolkien novels are a hard read but still seen as classics because they laid groundwork for the genre, the movies are seen as classics because they came first. They are probably Peter Jackson's best movies but that's only because he got even worse at editing as he went on.