Which is rubbish since the one Tolkien expert they did have didn't continue to work with them!
I know, says Payne the man with no resume whatsoever. It's laughable. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to join the dots here with what happened with Tom Shippey. Same with Peter Jackson, who they ghosted.
What's increasingly of interest to me is where did they money actually go? Because if you take away the money spent on the rights, and the surface level CGI, which impresses some, but not me, it didn't go on the creatives, and it didn't go on the cast of nobodies (and there's an article floating around about salaries, I have no idea whether this is accurate or not, but it makes sense that given the calibre of cast - there's no Charles Dance here as an example, or the myriad of top notch stars who worked on LOTR or GoT - the list is endless).
It did not go on "scale" as we have seen, as it looks in that regard very cheap indeed. So where did it go?
What's more surprising as I look back, is as this was the most expensive TV show ever made, by one the World's top 3 richest corporate entities, where was the promotion really?
Yeah, some trailers, the Oxford shills tour, the "influencers" disaster, buying reviews - but really? what else? - I think they knew what they had was crap and they spent their time and some money trying to limit the damage.
Now we have the show, and it all makes sense why they'd try and limit the damage.
Be interesting to see where they take S3-5 and what changes they make, I think it's probably too late to save S2 - but are we going to see more corporate hubris or a real and sincere attempt to make good?