Middle-Earth On Film: A Visual History
1. The Failed Attempts
Since their first publication in 1937 and 1954 respectively, there's been numerous attempts to try and bring The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings to the screen that stumbled at various stages of production. Middle-Earth just proved too vast and the content too sprawling to be properly realised by the standards of the time.
The most noteworthy almost-production was a Beatles-starring, Kubrick-directed picture floated in the late-sixties (imagine John Lennon as Gollum), although other attempts are pretty interesting, including a John Boorman-helmed take that, some startling divergences from the source aside, sounded to be of a similar scope to the iconic later adaptation.