We’ve seen calls to reshoot anticlimactic endings of massive TV franchises. Such fan revolts seem to have become the norm in recent years, with releases that fail to live up to viewers’ lofty expectations leading to high-profile backlash. (Until recently they would largely have expressed their disappointment through the ‘dislike’ button, but YouTube no longer reveals the number of people who engage with its thumbs-down feature publicly.)īut just what are the commenters angry about? Amazon’s much-criticised labour practices, perhaps, or Jeff Bezos’ foray into billionaire space tourism? No, the complaints largely seem to be about the trailer itself: its gleaming CGI-ishness, changes to Tolkien’s original story, minor details to sigils, dwarves and the like and – most pointedly – the fact that it seems a pale imitation of Peter Jackson’s much loved (and still fairly recent in the memory) adaptation. This “comment bomb” is designed to drown out any praise or even general discussion, and seems to have done the trick: at the time of writing, 68,000 people have commented on the video and pretty much all of them are that same damning quote. It can only distort and destroy what has been invented or created by the forces of good”. There you’ll find variations on the same quote, incorrectly attributed to Tolkien, posted over and over again, in Russian and Czech, Portuguese and Polish: “Evil is unable to create anything new. In terms of attracting eyeballs, Amazon’s gambit was a success: 257m people around the world watched the teaser in the first 24 hours after its release.ĭig a little deeper though – or rather scroll down to the comments section of that YouTube video – and things look dramatically less rosy. The teaser trailer that launched at the Super Bowl was designed to be the centrepiece of this marketing campaign a place in the most highly coveted advertising window on the planet, beamed into over 100m households in the US, as well as the rest of (Middle) Earth via YouTube.