A new retrospective from Polygon makes an argument that should resonate for anyone who has spent the last two decades watching studios chase Middle-earth’s box office numbers and viewers decline.
Terry Terrones writes that Hollywood got the wrong lesson from Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Studios copied the scale and the spectacle, and missed something simpler and harder to manufacture: genuine emotional investment in the characters.
Tolkien spent years building Middle-earth’s history and its languages, but he was clear about why. In his Letters, he wrote that what he most wanted was for readers to feel that this world had actually existed, that it had a real history behind it. The depth was in service of believability. The Shire works because Tolkien spent pages making hobbits feel like real people before the adventure starts: Bilbo’s pantry, Gandalf’s fireworks, Merry and Pippin stealing from Farmer Maggot, the Green Dragon. You know these people before they’re tested.
This is, in fact, Something Brandon Sanderson said in his recent talk at Oxford.
Jackson’s Fellowship honored that. The opening Shire sequences are unhurried. They don’t set up the plot. They make you care for these characters so that everything that follows means something. When Boromir dies, it resonates more loudly because the film focused in on his conflict before his final act of sacrifice.
Eragon, Warcraft, The Golden Compass, Seventh Son: all of them front-loaded spectacle and world-building and gave audiences no reason to care first. Studios kept copying the battles and missing the campfires. The Rings of Power spent extraordinary sums building a visual Second Age and delivered a world that invited admiration more than investment. We’re no fans of that show — not only because it didn’t honor Tolkien’s work, but because it did a ham-fisted and amateurish job in creating a world that should be grounded in epic fantasy and be populated with characters we should actually care about.
Jackson himself wasn’t immune to this infection either. The Hobbit trilogy took a 300-page children’s book and expanded it across three films, prioritizing scale and digital spectacle. The intimacy that made the book work, and that made his own trilogy work, got lost in the process.
Terrones’ line captures it: “It’s easy to imitate scale. It’s much harder to recreate humanity.”
If you want to dig into exactly what Jackson got right and wrong in adapting Tolkien’s text, our Exploring Tolkien podcast has a running “Film Changes” series, covering every significant departure from the books. Find it on our YouTube channel.
