LogFAQs > #973569118

Entity13 posted...

"It wasn't the higher-ups. The movie was doomed when the higher-ups made their demands."

"It wasn't the higher ups making demands. It was one demand that cascaded into a massive domino effect of suck."

In other words, the higher-ups didn't mess with the movies (your words) as much as the movie was fucked from the word go because of a single demand - when they told Jackson they wanted three movies (my words). Everything else that followed after was just window dressing. And I'd argue that it's likely that literally none of the things you complained about specifically (Radagast in general, the bird shit, including the LotR links and stuff from the appendixes, expanding stuff way beyond what it originally was, etc) came from execs as much as it did from Jackson himself. Because he was desperately struggling to pad that fucker out and didn't really have time to come up with better ideas (his words).

All the fuck-ups more or less stem from that singular bad decision early on - but it was still Jackson himself making most of them. It's not like with Wild Wild West where an insane exec was constantly making weird nonsensical demands and forcing them to put a giant mechanical spider into the movie.

Realistically, even wanting to put a romance subplot in hangs on that mistake. There'd be more room to push-back on it if it was just one movie (or even two movies), because there wouldn't necessarily be room for it otherwise. But when you're already struggling to come up with extra shit to fill time, having diversions into the White Council or weird Radagast stuff or "Dwarfeo and Julielf" subplots or "Hey, we need to get Orlando Bloom back because the female fans love him" are hard to say no to because "Hell, at least it uses up another 30 minutes or so!"

If it was one movie or two shorter movies (basically between 2-4 hours total content), and Jackson had been able to delegate to a different director who in turn had the necessary lead time to develop things, I think 95% of the problems with the movie would never have occurred, regardless of what the execs wanted. Jackson was too tired and unenthusiastic to care enough to push back, and didn't have an excuse to do so because he was already being forced to make shit up anyway.