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:
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
“His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”
—Werner Herzog (b. 1942)