The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson
 
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November 25 : 2009

Fans get credits again

I have to admit that I’ve never sat through the last part of the credits on the LOTR extended-edition DVDs. That’s the section where all the charter members of the official fan club had their names listed–including such notables as Elijah Wood. It takes 20 minutes for all those names to scroll by. I don’t know how many names there are, either, but there are a lot of people out there happy to have their names linked with the trilogy.

You’d think more studios would have done the same sort of thing with their DVDs, but it turns out that they haven’t–until now. Given how important online fans were to getting Paranormal Activity a theatrical release, Paramount announced that all fans who signed up at the film’s official website by November 9 would have their names  included at the end of the DVD. I’m not sure how long before November 9 the announcement was made. Stories hit the news media around November 5, as in this story in on Video Business.

The story compares Paramount’s offer to the LOTR one. For the epic LOTR, the 20 minutes was a relatively small section to add onto the end. For Paranormal Activity, which runs a mere 86-minutes, a long roll of fan names could be a big chunk of the DVD’s length.

More evidence that, although we’re coming up on the sixth anniversary of the release of the third part of the trilogy, the influence of LOTR doesn’t quit!

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    The Frodo Franchise
    by Kristin Thompson

    US flagbuy at best price

    Canadian flagbuy at best price

    UK flagbuy at best price

    Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
    hardcover 978-0-520-24774-1
    421 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 12 color illustrations; 36 b/w illustrations; 1 map; 1 table

    “Once in a lifetime.”
    The phrase comes up over and over from the people who worked on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. The film’s 17 Oscars, record-setting earnings, huge fan base, and hundreds of ancillary products attest to its importance and to the fact that Rings is far more than a film. Its makers seized a crucial moment in Hollywood—the special effects digital revolution plus the rise of “infotainment” and the Internet—to satisfy the trilogy’s fans while fostering a huge new international audience. The resulting franchise of franchises has earned billions of dollars to date with no end in sight.

    Kristin Thompson interviewed 76 people to examine the movie’s scripting and design and the new technologies deployed to produce the films, video games, and DVDs. She demonstrates the impact Rings had on the companies that made it, on the fantasy genre, on New Zealand, and on independent cinema. In fast-paced, compulsively readable prose, she affirms Jackson’s Rings as one the most important films ever made.

    The Frodo Franchise

    cover of Penguin Books’ (NZ) edition of The Frodo Franchise, published September 2007. The tiny subtitle reads: “How ‘The Lord of the Rings’ became a Hollywood blockbuster and put New Zealand on the map.”