My wife is a Tolkien purist. She has similar beefs about this that or the other omission. Here's the thing, though: no one gives a fuck about Tolkien purists. And they shouldn't. I watched the chairman of DC Comics tell a room full of Warner Brothers execs "Look - there are about two and a half million comic book buyers in the United States. If we have to steamroll the wants and desires of every single one of them in order to get people to watch Green Lantern that's just a sound business decision."

If I ask Google "how many people have read Lord of the Rings" it tells me 150 million people. Take my $300m budget, add in 50% for P&L and divide by three because if each movie doesn't make its money back opening weekend it's a failure and I'm at "I need fifty cents from every Lord of the Rings fan, living or dead, at each and every premiere." Movie tickets were eight bucks back then, give or take, so now it ain't so dire - if one out of every fifteen-sixteen Lord of the Rings fans will commit to coming out and seeing the movies on opening weekend, every opening weekend I break even the Hollywood way, in which the trades don't call me a failure. They don't call me a success, either... and considering what was riding on LOTR, we kinda need that.

Now - those figures represent the number of people who have read Lord of the Rings 20 years after the movies premiered and they're still impossible. Far better to get in every 20th person who has ever heard of a Hobbit. Or every 30th person who thinks Liv Tyler is hot. With any luck, you can satisfy the "idiocrats" while also making a good movie because I'm here to tell ya - there is no universe in which I give the first fuck about Tom Bombadil. And you don't really either you just insist on his presence because it's fucking canon.

For the record? Gilgamesh has a character arc. Tristan & Isolde have character arcs. Coyote the Trickster has an arc. This was pretty much Campbell's argument: the Monomyth is an arc. It's not stupid to want character development, it's human.