would be better than compression; in the script he was shown, he found the compression excessive, with "resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation". Peter Jackson's film trilogy Peter Jackson's film series was released as three films between 2001 and 2003. The budget was $281 million, and together the three films grossed over $2.9 billion worldwide. The series runs for 9 hours, 18 minutes in the "theatrical" or cinema version, and 11 hours, 26 minutes in the extended version released on DVD. Although long for a film trilogy, this was short compared to Tolkien's work, presenting the films' makers with a major challenge of abridgement, compression, and transformation for the production of the series. Filmgoers and non-academic reviewers rated the films as almost perfect, The Two Towers actually scoring "a rare 100%" on Rotten Tomatoes, and gaining many Oscars and other film awards. The film scholar Kristin Thompson, reviewing an early book on Tolkien on Film, wrote that "[literary] scholars seem particularly irked by the films' enormous popularity, not just among fans but also among reviewers", noting that the films have brought a "vastly enlarged" audience to The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps millions of new readers to the book; and that there are "book-firsters" and "film-firsters" among Tolkien fans, as evidenced (she writes) by the message boards on TheOneRing.net. Differences The film version differs in content from the written version in several ways, including cutting some scenes, adding scenes, adjusting scenes to cope with other changes, such as moving some action to different locations, and adding some minor characters. The differences of content created by the necessary compression and transformation of Tolkien's story inevitably result in differences of style. Commentators have addressed the question of whether the observed differences are appropriate. Transformation Scholars have stated multiple reasons why a film-maker would need to transform the source text into a screenplay. Tolkien's version contains a variety of types of writing, especially descriptions of landscape, characters, and their appearance, namely narrative, dialogue, and embedded songs and poems. As Joseph Ricke and Catherine Barnett write, "Tolkien's characters … – like the narrative in which they exist – pause often for reflection, lamentation, poetry, song, moral inventory, refocusing, wrestling with their consciences, and debating their commitment to the mission before them." Furthermore, the main text is supplemented by a prologue on the nature of hobbits, the distinctive small people