question of the day: Did Peter Jackson just ruin ‘The Lovely Bones’ as a movie by giving in to test audience?

What a terrible question of the day. I demand more snark.

erf. I've been a little dubious about this story translating well to film in the first place, more so about Peter Jackson's ability to do it justice beyond making it look pretty. (He does great films, I'm just unsure about *this* film)This report doesn't raise my expectations, to say the least.

Well, I felt "Lord of the Rings" tripped at the finish line by him NOT listening to all the fans who felt (as I do) that he should have included the scouring of the Shire. Which, incidentally, I think would have fit in easily if he'd taken out about 30 minutes of battle scenes.

This one's impossible to judge until we see it, but as a practice, seeing how a film plays and then making adjustments strikes me as sensible, and some of the best filmmakers have done it.

Most famously, Frank Capra did "test" screenings of all his major films specifically to see how things played, and he threw out an entire reel of "Lost Horizons" after a disastrous first screening convinced him it needed to be shorter. He wrote about it in his autobiography, as a technique that was indispensable, and one he insisted on from his second film at Columbia on.

I would like to think Peter Jackson wouldn't risk ruining the movie for a test audience, maybe he thinks they have a point or thinks it works just as good, perhaps he held back at first, thinking they wouldn't like it the way they in fact demanded it. Im sure if it was against his good taste he wouldnt put it in there.

Then again maybe the studio is forcing him to ensure marketability, and he's trying to do as little that he has to do against his better judgment, but still has to add that, otherwise the studio's investment is at risk. Either way i doubt its gonna ruin the movie, this is is the same guy who did "Frightners", and i thought that movie was awesome, so maybe this will be in that vein, there was a lot of violence but some of it was in a dark comedy kinda way. Im still anticipating this for sure.

the book is rather bloody so maybe he fixed it by putting more violence/blood in it

also if he added stuff is because he shot it on the first place and then didn't include in the cut

I shudder to think how long "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy would have been if he put in everything fans missed.

But you could see a test audience as a critique group, in a minor sort of way. Just about every story I've sold has been changed by suggestions made by a critique group or an editor.

For a moment I was puzzled because I had just read another article that had quoted Jackson as saying he cut out a lot to do with the murder in this story, and he was very comfortable showing this film to his own daughter. But reading the spoiler, it all makes sense. And I can kind of understand why the audience was a bit bloodthirsty now.

*possible spoilers!*

I read the spoiler, and I guess I can see their point. While looking at Amazon customer reviews for this book, I saw that the lack of Killer Gets What He Deserves In The End to be a big sore point for some.
Now, I haven't read the book, and while I can sympathize with wanting the clean Hollywood ending where killer meets karmic death, family gets to finally say goodbye, and lessons are learned as everyone heads into the sunset, it SEEMS that the author was going for something more realistic here. There is no clean happy ending for everyone, and sometimes killers don't get their perfect karmic deaths. The story seems to me to be more of a personal story about relationships than a Good vs Evil murder movie.

I would've hoped that PJ would've earned a bit more self-confidence as a filmmaker by now not to rely test audiences to tell him how to shoot scenes.

No, I don't believe that Peter botched it or anything. I stand by his decision for the test audience and they only gave him suggestions, not orders. So I want all of you to back off and give the man some space and stop giving him crap. He only listened to the audience because they must've had a point!