Film
Tolkien originally sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, but they never made a film, and in 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company.
In the early seventies John Boorman was planning a film of The Lord of the Rings, but the plans never went further because of movie studio politics. Some of the work done was resurrected for the film Excalibur in 1981.
Ralph Bakshi directed an animated movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in 1978 (partly made with the rotoscope technique), which covered only the first half of The Lord of the Rings. Rankin-Bass covered the second half with a children's TV animation The Return of the King (1980); earlier they had made a TV animation of The Hobbit (1977).
The Lord of the Rings was adapted as a trilogy of films (2001–03), directed by Peter Jackson.
The split of Tolkien's works between Tolkien Enterprises and the Tolkien Estate means that none of the Tolkien Enterprises' products can include source material from outside The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and therefore a film or stage version of The Silmarillion is highly unlikely.
Comparisons have been made to the plot of the science fiction television show Babylon 5 and Tolkien's works.
Read more about this topic: Works Inspired By J. R. R. Tolkien
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you’re making a horror film doesn’t mean you can’t make an artful film.”
—David Cronenberg (b. 1943)
“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)