I was thinking some more about the new game “Shadow of Mordor” (read the review by Carolyn Petit here). I can’t really add anything to her review — she makes it sound like the plot of God of War was transplanted into an Assassin’s Creed game set among some of Tolkien’s ideas — not truly in the Tolkien universe.
I wanted to criticize Christopher Tolkien and the literary estate for allowing this to happen, but then I read this article about the Tolkien Estate’s battles with Warner over digital content, and I saw that the Estate had accepted a percentage of the net film proceeds — which is incredible to me. Everybody knows that films don’t make money on net, and if you want to get paid you need a piece of the gross. This is not news.
So I started thinking about CT’s age; he sounds pretty sharp in the interview, but the guy was born in 1924, and he licensed the films in something like 2004, so he was 80 then and he’s 90 now. So I’m now I’m just feeling down about the whole thing.
I bet when CT dies, Warner will execute their option to dig up the remains of JRR Tolkien, hang him, and then burn him, like the royalists did with Oliver Cromwell.