One of the big cinematic “what ifs” I think about every so often is if LOTR had been done a decade later in this “new golden age of TV” as a miniseries (or series of miniseries. Miniseriesseries? Whatever it’s called when you adapt a finite amount of content across multiple seasons. Limited series? I digress). A much more faithful adaptation (with Bombadil included) probably would have been possible with the extra breathing room. I love the films, especially the first two, but I reread the novel a couple years ago and the richness of that experience is just so far beyond anything a trilogy of feature films could hope to achieve, even a trilogy of very long ones.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to rewatch those myself for a while (and also to reread the book because I got The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion for my birthday a few months ago, which is basically 1200 pages of chapter-by-chapter annotations for the novel, but that’s going to require some serious commitment that I can’t really manage at the moment). I only own the extended edition on blu-ray, though, and I’d really prefer the theatrical cuts for this. I think the whole trilogy is fourteen bucks on amazon right now, I should really order that one of these days.