Benjamin Olson
Hero
It sort of reminds me of author Michael Ende getting so upset and litigious over the on the whole fairly faithful adaptation of the first half of the Neverending Story book into a now classic children's fantasy movie that when the sequel was finally made it not only had an almost entirely separate set of talent but only followed the second half of the book in the loosest sense possible and is basically a train-wreck.
I'm sure those in control of the Tolkien estate think they can just wash their hands of this thing, but the simple fact is the ponderous Silmarillion is known about by far more people than actually read it and remember it. Most people who don't know the details of Tolkien licensing but know the basics about Tolkien's work will assume this Amazon prequel series is derived from the Silmarillion. Heck, as someone who has had the Silmarillion wash over me a couple of times now I'm fairly sure I could have watched the series and still not been sure that whatever matter it covers wasn't somewhere in there (to be clear I think there are lots of great ideas for heroic fantasy stories in the non-novel works of Tolkien and would love to see them adapted, but they are not particularly enjoyable reads to me in their current forms, which were never really intended for public consumption).
The reputation of the IP being protected will only suffer from not playing ball, and we the viewing public will only get a series with compromised lore, replacing worldbuilding elements the most famous worldbuilder in the history of the genre obsessed over for a lifetime with whatever a writers room can slap together on a time crunch on advise of legal counsel. The series might be great in spite of this, but in terms of richness of lore, everybody loses but the lawyers.
