Amazon, LoTR, Christopher Tolkien, and More

Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R.R. Tolkien, has resigned from the Tolkien Estate ahead of the announced TV deal with Amazon.

For those of you GEICO commercial inhabitants who are living under rocks, Amazon Video paid a cool (estimated) $200 million to $250 million for the television rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, announced the deal himself on Twitter.  You don’t see that kind of activity every day.  I read some speculation (or perhaps a rumor) that Bezos was directly involved in the negotiations.  HBO and Netflix may also have had a shot at the rights before the Tolkien Estate went with Bezos and Amazon.

Who will actually produce the show?  No idea yet.  I’m sure a lot of production companies would love a shot at it.  Fannish reactions are a mixture of despair and hope.

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A Few Recent Movie Reviews

While I am not aspiring to become a professional movie critic, a friend of mine owns a movie review site he had shut down a few years back.  About a year ago I thought it would be fun to resurrect the site and publish some new reviews.  Ideally, I’d love to see the old team of writers get back into action but they have all moved on so for now it’s just a fun project.  But here are some of the reviews I have published:

Humanity is Threatened

Production still from ‘Independence Day: Resurgence’

2016 is proving to be a great year for fantasy movies and games, in my opinion.  Although I am not much of a gamer I appreciate the quality of the games that are being released.  I know someone with an XBox, for example, and have watch him play some of the games he enjoys.  Talk about immersing yourself in a fully cinematic experience!  Wow!  But my attention is now fully given to the movies and I wanted to share a review I wrote for A1 Movie Reviews for “Independence Day: Resurgence”.  Short version: I really like this movie.

What People are Saying about ‘Captain America: Civil War’

I saw “Captain America: Civil War” the other day and I loved it.  This was, in my opinion, the best superhero movie I have ever seen.  Until now “Iron Man” held that position in my esteem.  Both movies are fresh and original compared to what came before them.

You can read my longer review of “Captain America: Civil War” on SF-Fandom’s forums.  It’s not easy to write a movie review when you have so many things going through your head.  My hat is off to professional movie reviewers who do this week in and week out.  In fact, my movie tastes are rather limited.  I would not do well if I had to watch a lot of the movies that are reviewed.

Bringing A Star Wars Galaxy to a Middle-earth Near You

It seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.  This week “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” opens in theaters around the world (and advanced ticket sales surged past $100 million several days ago, setting a new record).  And fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas are constantly comparing their stories, partly because Lucas borrowed some ideas from Tolkien and partly because that is what science fiction and fantasy fans do.  So I decided to take a new look at the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings tales side-by-side.

Xenite.Org Adds Star Wars to Movie Portal

When I first launched Xenite.Org in 1997 I consolidated content from several science fiction and fantasy Websites I had set up on other services.  Within months I began adding new (sub-) sites to the domain, including Star Wars content.  Long ago I moved most of that content to another domain, SF-Worlds.Com, but I have always wanted to build a new section devoted to Star Wars on Xenite.Org.  This week I finally completed work on what I hope will become a much larger section over the next few years.