Latest news with #MiddleEarth
Gizmodo
21 hours ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
‘Black Panther' and Its Team Deserved Better Than This
Days ago, the video game sphere was thrown into shock when EA revealed it'd canceled its Black Panther game. The project, announced in 2023, was to be the debut of developer Cliffhanger Games, which was headed up by developers who made Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. With its game dead, Cliffhanger's been shut down, and anyone not transferred elsewhere within EA's various internal studios has been laid off. At the time of the game's cancellation, Cliffhanger hadn't revealed anything about Black Panther, and all we had to go on was a job listing indicating it'd be a single-player, open-world title. In the wake of the project and studio's end, we now know some of it would've involved several playable characters—from T'Challa to his sister Shuri and son Azari—fighting Skrulls invading Wakanda. This game would've featured Skrulls posing as allies and relationships formed between the other non-playable heroes and other NPCs in Wakanda. For all intents and purposes, it was to be similar to the Nemesis System introduced in the Middle-Earth: Shadow games. Several alums from Monolith's Lord of the Rings duology reunited to form Cliffhanger, but EA felt the studio was moving too slow, which came in part because Cliffhanger was building staff alongside its prototypes and builds to show EA how it would all come together. What makes this situation even more sad is how not shocking it is that Black Panther got killed. Last year, EA canceled a single-player Star Wars FPS from Respawn, its own internal studio responsible for the hit Jedi games, and which has also had two separate, attempted spinoffs for its own Titanfall series suffer the same fate. This past February, WB Games put the kibosh on its Wonder Woman game from Monolith (which also got closed down), and we learned in April of a Blade Runner game that'll likely never see the light of day. The Last of Us, Spider-Man, Halo; whether it's a whole game or a specific mode, from an established franchise or something new, in development or just recently came out, the industry has been full of cancellations in recent years, with layoffs following not long after. On the outside looking in, a Black Panther game feels like an easy call to make. Superhero video games are in a good place right now, and this specific character's been an A-lister since his debut in Captain America: Civil War in 2016 and his own 2018 movie became a massive, global phenomenon. He's part of the ever-increasing lineup of Marvel Rivals and is set to co-lead Skydance's 2026-bound Marvel 1943, and whether it'd be T'Challa, Shuri, or Azari, the hero has never headlined a game on his lonesome, making EA's decision to kill it so frustrating. It certainly doesn't appear to be affecting its three-game deal with Marvel; both companies have since said the partnership will continue with Motive's Iron Man game and at least one other project yet to be announced. But in the wake of this news, and EA's alleged treatment of its original, non-multiplayer franchises like Dragon Age, it's hard to fully buy that either of these projects, or any single-player project at the publisher's internal teams will come out, which puts the people actually making those games in an unfair light. The games industry's problems didn't start with Cliffhanger and Black Panther, and they'll continue well past this moment in time. But it speaks volumes that an attempted game of this caliber starring a character from one of the biggest media franchises around right now can't get off the ground and the team behind it is paying for EA's past, unrelated financial troubles. More than anything, the studio should've gotten to have its moment in the sun, as all developers do for the games they've spent nearly a decade or less of their lives making. Those opportunities feel like they're becoming increasingly rarer in this industry, and it won't be good for anyone should it continue becoming the norm.
Geek Tyrant
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
One Flipbook to Rule Them All: LORD OF THE RINGS Fans Unite for the Longest Flipbook Ever Made — GeekTyrant
Animator Andymation is inviting fans to join an insanely ambitious art project—a frame-by-frame, hand-drawn flipbook of T he Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that aims to become the longest flipbook ever made. This three-hour beast will require more than 100,000 illustrated frames and the help of 1,600 fans around the world to pull it off. Whether you're an experienced artist or just someone who loves Middle-earth, you can pick a clip, trace it, add your own flair, and send it in. Everyone who contributes gets a custom ring engraved in Elvish, because obviously. It's fan art on a legendary scale—and you can sign up at to be part of it.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Amazon has killed the wrong ludicrously expensive fantasy show
Abandon all spoke – The Wheel of Time has shuddered to a premature halt. After three seasons of sorcerous derring-do, Amazon has put the brakes on its $18 million-per-episode, Rosamund Pike-fronted adaptation of Robert Jordan's fantasy saga. The original novels run to 14 volumes. Prime Video made it through the first four and a bit. It's like pulling the plug on Lord of the Rings before second breakfast or killing off James Bond when he'd just only parked himself at the roulette table. To WoT's considerable fanbase, the cancellation is a huge injustice (an online petition is, of course, already up and running). But in one sense, Prime's instincts were absolutely correct. It's about time the streamer pulled the plug on a mega-budget fantasy series that blatantly attempts to be the new Game of Thrones and is based on a beloved source material. The only error is that it flushed the wrong franchise away. The obvious candidate for cancellation is Middle-earth prequel show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Not only because it's terrible – its mishmash of awful wigs and even worse dialogue an insult to JRR Tolkien's meticulous world-building. More than that, the series has become a dead weight around the neck of Amazon – demonstrating the folly billionaires such as company founder Jeff Bezos can wreak with an unlimited budget and the conviction fantasy fans will swallow any tosh so long as it comes with wobbly prosthetic elf ears. Bezos has been criticised for firing Katy Perry into high orbit on his Blue Origin rocket. But if anything deserves to be blasted into deep space, it's the appalling Rings Of Power – which comes with a mind-bending per-episode budget of between $60 - $100 million (depending on whether you factor in the $250 million Amazon paid at the outset for the right to make merry in Middle-earth). In the case of Wheel of Time, the sheer amount of story to get through meant there was always a danger it would be killed off early. However, while the threat of cancellation was ever-present, the decision is widely understood to be related to the departure in March of Prime studio head Jennifer Salke. She had presided over a string of disasters, including Rings of Power and dead-on-arrival espionage series Citadel (a $1 billion budget and no viewers). With a track record like that, Prime was believed to have had misgivings about putting her in charge of James Bond after acquiring creative control of 007 from Eon Productions. Even by the standards of a mega corporation such as Amazon, Wheel of Time was a vast undertaking. In 2019, the company commenced building from scratch a full-scale town on a dedicated site 25 miles outside Prague. It was to serve as a base for a production that, all going well, would run for a decade (all did not go well). Pike – who played Gandalf-esque wizard Moiraine– had moved the Central Europe with her partner and children and expected to be there for the foreseeable. As co-producer on the show, she went all in on the Wheel of Time universe, even narrating several of the tie-in audiobooks (volume one, The Eye of the World, has a run time of 32 hours). She was joined by a cast of literally hundreds. There were grand battles involving a mind-boggling 3,500 FX shots in series one alone (1,000 more than in Marvel's Endgame) and a globe-hopping schedule, that took in Morocco, Italy, South Africa and the Canary Islands. In all, nearly 1,000 people are thought to have worked on the production – comparable to a large scale Hollywood movie. It was much better than Rings of Power too. Moiraine headed a solid cast that also included Peaky Blinders actress Natasha O'Keefe as a vengeful demon. The fight scenes were inventive, spectacularly violent and visually dazzling. Crucially, everything made sense – in contrast to Rings Of Power, which implied an absurd sexual chemistry between elf Queen Galadriel and the wicked Sauron. Compared to some of Jennifer Salke's more prominent flops, Wheel of Time was by no means a calamity. Reviews for series three were positive; ratings were solid. The sub-par production values and fake-looking costumes that had hobbled season one had been put right, too. But WoT was perceived as one of Salke's projects and news that it has been cast into the void is not surprising. The oliphaunt in the room is that fantasy is no longer a voguish genre. Amazon had acquired the rights to Wheel of Time after Jeff Bezos commanded underlings to present him with a project that had the potential to become the new Game of Thrones (the studio made its bid for Lord of the Rings around the same time). Going on for a decade later, Succession and The White Lotus have put eat-the-rich style social satire at the top of the Hollywood want list (see Julianne Moore's new Netflix project, Sirens). Long-haired weirdos running around in capes babbling about the Dark One simply doesn't cut it – especially not when each episode costs the best part of $20 million. Where does that leave Rings of Power? The show has been consistently dire, featuring cheap-looking sets, cheesy dialogue and – for reasons best known to the producers – a tribe of hobbit ancestors who sounded like 'thick Irish builders' from a 1970s sitcom. Horrific on every level, its trajectory has been the opposite of that of Wheel of Time, which slowly built a loyal audience (though viewership admittedly fell off from season one to two). In the case of Rings of Power, just one-third of viewers finished the first series, while audiences fell by half in year two. Why not cancel? The depressing answer is, as part of the rights deal, Prime Video is committed to making five seasons. Which means three more years of TV torture – for them and us. In a grim snapshot of television in 2025, a well-made (and much cheaper) show such as Wheel of Time is pitched into oblivion while the atrocious RoP gets to clop off into the sunset, scorned by practically everyone except the great unblinking eye of Jeff Bezos. It is a bleak end to a cautionary tale. One that, in years to come, is likely to be seen as a warning against Hollywood hubris and the dangers of throwing too much money at a billionaire's pipe dream.
Gizmodo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Lego's New ‘Lord of the Rings' Set Decides What Shall and Shall Not Pass Your Bookshelf
Ever since Lego returned to making annual Lord of the Rings set, the company has gone big, with high price, high-parts-count sets that bring bits of Middle-earth to life on as grand a scale as possible. Its next one, however, is a little different. We already got our annual big Lord of the Rings set this year with the release of The Shire, but Lego is bringing Lord of the Rings into another of its toy lines with today's announcement of a buildable book nook recreating Gandalf's confrontation with the Balrog in Moria from Fellowship of the Rings. Following on in the vein of the Sherlock Holmes book nook revealed last month, the $130, 1201-piece Lord of the Rings set can either be displayed entirely unfurled, or folded up into a compacted version of the iconic scene that can be easily slotted into a book shelf (presumably one you've stuffed with plenty of Tolkien tomes). Lego Lord of the Rings Balrog Book Nook The Balrog Book Book includes, of course, a minifigure of Gandalf wielding his sword and staff, as well as a brick-built Balrog, which comes with a recreation of its flame whip as well as massive wings that unfurl outwards when the set is folded out, framed by columns of fire. And, of course, on the front of the set whether it's in the folded or unfolded configuration is a brick printed with Gandalf's legendary 'You shall not pass!' quote from the scene, guaranteeing you doing your best Ian McKellen impression whenever you look at it. It's an unusual move for Lego to bring Lord of the Rings to some of its other product lines after it's spent the past few years exclusively treating it as a yearly one-off, and hopefully a sign that we might see more of Middle-earth than just one massively pricey set each year. An architecture set of Minas Tirith? An buildable art piece replicating the painting in Rivendell of Sauron and Isildur's battle? What about a botanicals set of the White Tree of Gondor, or a bundle of athelas? Hell, I can't be the only one thinking that the fellowship sailing past the Argonath might have made just as good as a book nook idea as Moria, honestly! It might not be a return to the full-throated Lord of the Rings line that some fans might have wished for, but it lets us hope–even if it's just a fool's hope–that we might start seeing Lord of the Rings pop up on Lego shelves a little more regularly. The Lego Lord of the Rings Balrog Book Nook is available to pre-order now, ahead of a release on June 1.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Silicon Valley's Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits
For generations of fans, J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy 'The Lord of the Rings' remains their first experience of the immersive magic of fiction. The trilogy recounts how a motley group of friends set out on a journey to destroy the great Ring of Power and defeat the dark Lord Sauron, who intends to use its dreadful magic to rule all of Middle-earth through 'force and fear.' The Ring corrupts all who use it, and its story endures as a potent allegory about the corrupting effects of greed and pride and what Tolkien called the evil 'lust for domination.' Given the trilogy's idealistic overtones, it's easy to understand why the books gained a cult following in the 1970s among hippies and Vietnam War protesters, who embraced its love of nature and rejection of consumer culture, and what they saw as its passionate denunciation of militarism and power politics. It's more difficult to understand why the trilogy's most prominent fans today are Silicon Valley tech lords like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and a rising group of far-right politicians in both Europe and the United States. How did a trilogy of novels about wizards and elves and furry-footed hobbits become a touchstone for right-wing power brokers? How did books that evince nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial past win an ardent following among the people who are shaping our digital future? Why do so many of today's high-profile fans of 'The Lord of the Rings' and other fantasy and sci-fi classics insist on turning these cautionary tales into aspirational road maps for mastering the universe? Some of the answers lie in the sheer popularity of the trilogy, which has sold more than 150 million copies across the world and permeated the public imagination, as genre fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Right-wing operatives realized that references to works like 'The Lord of the Rings,' 'Star Wars' and role-playing games (many of which are heavily indebted to Tolkien) could serve their own political ends. Steve Bannon was fascinated by World of Warcraft gamers — 'rootless white males' with, he said, 'monster power' — and sought to channel their passions toward the right-wing site Breitbart News and, later, Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. In Spain, the far-right party Vox tried to hijack 'Lord of the Rings' imagery, posting a picture of the warrior Aragorn facing off against a group of enemies depicted as left-wing, feminist and L.G.B.T.Q. groups. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy is famous for her love of Tolkien. The Times correspondent Jason Horowitz has chronicled how as a teenager in the 1990s, she attended a Hobbit Camp organized by members of the country's post-fascist right, which had embraced the fantasy series as a way of turning their own political marginalization into an asset: By identifying with hobbits, they hoped to override memories of Mussolini and recast themselves as underdogs. The young Meloni dressed up as a hobbit and attended singalongs with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell'Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring. For some right-wing politicians today, 'Lord of the Rings' embodies nostalgia for a bygone era, conjuring a vaguely medieval past where there are clear hierarchies of authority and class, and sharply delineated races (elves, dwarves, hobbits and orcs) with distinctive appearances and talents. Others argue that 'Lord of the Rings' embodies the tenets of Traditionalism — a once arcane philosophical doctrine that has recently gained influential adherents around the world including Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian philosopher and adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin, and Bannon. According to the scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum, Traditionalism posits that we are currently living in a dark age brought on by modernity and globalization; if today's corrupt status quo is toppled, we might return to a golden age of order — much the way that Tolkien's trilogy ends with the rightful king of Arnor and Gondor assuming the throne and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity. A similar taste for kingly power has taken hold in Silicon Valley. In a guest essay in The Times last year, the former Apple and Google executive Kim Scott pointed to 'a creeping attraction to one-man rule in some corners of tech.' This management style known as 'founder mode,' she explained, 'embraces the notion that a company's founder must make decisions unilaterally rather than partner with direct reports or frontline employees.' The new mood of autocratic certainty in Silicon Valley is summed up in a 2023 manifesto written by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who describes himself and his fellow travelers as 'Undertaking the Hero's Journey, rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.' Andreessen, along with Musk and Thiel, helped muster support for Trump in Silicon Valley, and he depicts the tech entrepreneur as a conqueror who achieves 'virtuous things' through brazen aggression, and villainizes anything that might slow growth and innovation — like government regulation and demoralizing concepts like 'tech ethics' and 'risk management.' 'We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature,' Andreesen writes. 'We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.' 'A Duty to Save the World' Silicon Valley's love of Tolkien — and fantasy and science fiction more broadly — dates to its earliest days, when rooms at the Stanford A.I. Lab were named after locations in Middle-earth, and a popular thread called 'SF-Lovers' effectively became the first online social network in the 1970s. In those days, the fledgling computer community was very much a part of the Bay Area counterculture, and hackers there saw themselves as rebels going up against the establishment represented by big corporations like IBM. Like many hippies of the day, they identified with the little hobbits who help save Middle-earth and the eccentric outsiders who populate the work of science fiction masters like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. Today, of course, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are more powerful than IBM, and the best-known figures in Silicon Valley are entrepreneurs and venture capitalists worth billions. Affection for Tolkien endures — partly because a love for fantasy and science fiction seems hard-wired in many geeks. But the small gestures of tribute to Tolkien that techies made decades ago (like equipping office printers with Elvish fonts) have given way to extravagant spectacles like the Napster co-founder Sean Parker's 'Lord of the Rings'-inspired wedding, which cost, by some estimates, more than $10 million and featured Middle-earth-inspired costumes for several hundred guests. Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, a lifelong Tolkien fan, oversaw the company's purchase of the rights to the 'Lord of the Rings' back story for $250 million. Multiple seasons of its streaming series 'The Rings of Power,' Vanity Fair reports, will most likely cost over $1 billion, making it the most expensive series ever made. Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and mega donor to right-wing causes, says he's read the trilogy at least 10 times. He has named several companies after magical objects in 'Lord of the Rings.' Vice President JD Vance, whose careers in business and politics were nurtured by Thiel, followed in his steps. Vance has said that a lot of his 'conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up,' and he named his venture firm Narya Capital after Gandalf's magic ring of fire. Classic fantasy and science fiction stories have informed how many fans think about the world, giving them a Manichaean vocabulary of good vs. evil, and a propensity for asserting that the future of civilization is constantly at stake. The stories also acted as an exhortation to think big and to pursue huge, improbable dreams. In much the way that sci-fi anticipated many of the remarkable inventions we now take for granted (think: cellphones, video conferencing or biometric screenings), many engineers and inventors today aspire to create transformative technologies that might one day enable humans to merge with machine intelligence, say, or live in outer space. On one hand: the possibility of groundbreaking, disruptive innovations. On the other: all the dangers of hubris and carelessness we were warned about by science fiction from 'Frankenstein' to 'Metropolis' to '2001: A Space Odyssey.' When he was a child, Musk read Asimov's 'Foundation' series — books that inspired his dream of building a colony on Mars and would spur his resolve, as he put it in a speech at the United States Air Force Academy, 'to work hard to make science fiction not fiction.' The Asimov novels feature a brilliant mathematician named Hari Seldon, who develops an algorithmic scheme for predicting the future, which enables him to foresee the end of the Galactic Empire and make plans to preserve human civilization by building a new society on another planet. Asimov's 'Foundation' series and Tolkien's trilogy ('my favorite book ever,' Musk has said) helped forge his grandiose sense of mission, as the heroes in those books, he told The New Yorker in 2009, 'felt a duty to save the world.' Like 'Lord of the Rings,' the Foundation novels trace a narrative arc that has resonated with right-wing politicians intent on remaking the world. It's a story line in which a hero or a group of heroes takes on the challenge of a civilization in crisis. They wage war against a dangerous or moribund establishment and aspire to build a brave new world out of the ashes of the old. Similar plot dynamics are at work in Robert A. Heinlein's 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,' which depicts a colony of freedom-loving settlers on the moon and their successful revolt against the oppressive rule of bureaucrats on planet Earth. Suspicious of 'Machine Worshipers' Literary classics, of course, can support myriad interpretations, and we live in an age when the points of view of readers are increasingly prioritized over authorial intentions. At the same time, it's astonishing how many contemporary takes on classic works of fantasy and science fiction fly in the face of both common sense and authors' known views of the world. Consider Mark Zuckerberg's decision to rebrand Facebook as 'Meta' — a reference to the so-called metaverse, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel 'Snow Crash,' which depicts an alarming dystopian future where corporate power has replaced government institutions and a dangerous virus is on the loose. Or take Stargate, the name of OpenAI's new artificial intelligence initiative with SoftBank and Oracle, announced in conjunction with the Trump administration. Its name, weirdly, is the title of a campy 1994 sci-fi movie in which a stargate device opens a portal to a faraway planet, where a despotic alien vows to destroy Earth with a supercharged atomic bomb. Not exactly the sort of magical portal most people would want to open. Tolkien himself regarded 'machine worshipers' with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England's landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home. Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. 'They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.' Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley's penchant for naming tech companies after objects in 'Lord of the Rings' — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today's military-industrial complex: The data analytics firm Palantir gets its name from the magical 'seeing stones' in 'Lord of the Rings,' while the artificial intelligence military start-up Anduril refers to Aragorn's reforged sword. The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of 'transhumanism' — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? This question drives stories set in outer space (from 'Star Trek' to 'Star Wars' to 'Doctor Who') and stories set in a mythical past. In the case of 'The Lord of the Rings,' Tolkien argued that mortality is part of 'the given nature of Men,' and the Elves called it 'the Gift of God (to Men),' allowing them 'release from the weariness of Time.' Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants. Many prominent readers of 'Lord of the Rings' no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price). In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Thiel traced his fascination with immortality to the elves in 'Lord of the Rings,' calling them 'humans who don't die.' Echoing the interviewer he asked: 'Why can't we be elves?' The neoreactionary ideologue Curtis Yarvin, who thinks American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy or 'chief executive,' dismissively refers to the sort of ordinary voters who helped elect Trump as hobbits who only 'want to grill and raise kids.' Tolkien, in contrast, proudly described himself as 'a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.' Not only is 'Lord of the Rings' told from the point of view of the hobbits, but it's Frodo's gardener, the humble Sam Gamgee — not the noble king Aragorn or the great wizard Gandalf — who emerges as the real hero of the epic. Sam plays a crucial role in carrying out the mission of destroying the Ring, and his story is the one that concludes the trilogy. After the war of the Ring, we learn, Sam returns home to the Shire, where he is elected mayor, marries his girlfriend, Rosie, and raises 13 children. Sam, Tolkien wrote in a 1956 letter, was inspired by the brave English soldiers he'd served with during World War I, and other letters suggest that he saw the heroics of Sam and Frodo as a testament to his belief that small hands 'move the wheels of the world' because 'they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.'
