Crowdfunding drive to build life-sized Minas Tirith replica.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yes, some very ambitious people want to recreate Minas Tirith for the modest price of nearly three billion dollars. Based on how much they want compared to how much they've raised, I fully believe they'll fail, but I'm still kind of impressed by the audacity of it.

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/08/13/lo ... ng-project

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Posted August 13 2015 — 9:51 AM EDT

A group of architects and Lord of the Rings fans is hoping to bring a slice of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world to life. It’s just going to take a lot of funding to do so.

An IndieGoGo campaign has been set up to raise funds in the hopes of building a real-world Minas Tirith (also known as Minas Anor), the capital city of Gondor. The city was seen in full, as in the picture above, in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the RIngs: The Return of the King, and the Tolkien fans behind the project hope to build their own version.

The price-point they’re hoping to reach on IndieGoGo? Well, that’s where the dream faces its biggest challenge. The team who started the project are looking to raise £1.85 billion, which is roughly $2.9 billion. For reference, the highest-grossing IndieGoGo campaign in U.S. dollars took in $12.8 million, while the Pebble Time took in about $20 million on Kickstarter. So yes, if the Minas Tirith campaign were to succeed, it would become the biggest crowdfunding project by a massive margin.

At the moment, however, 12 days into the 60-day campaign, the project has raised a little over £16,000. There are myriad tiers to pledge money, including a £10,000 option to become a Lord or Lady of the city, though the architects and engineers running the project promise that no one will be charged if they don’t hit their goal. If they do, they plan to start building in 2016 and hopefully completed by 2023.

Check out the campaign to see their general plans for the city, which would have both residential and commercial areas, and just what exactly all of that money would go toward. And until the campaign ends, there are always virtually built versions of Minas Tirith you can visit.

[Patroklos]

I feel like Rivendell is a more achievable and overall smarter project, but good luck to them.

[madd0ct0r]

link to actual campiagn. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/real ... ith#/story

They were on £8000 yesterday. I might chuck £50 at them, it's very unlikely to fund, and thus I loose nothing

[Iroscato]

It's on £52,000 at the moment. Impressive, I have to say...but my cynical side is questioning why the media picked up on this campaign rather than the frankly hundreds of more worthwhile causes out there. Guess I'm getting old...

[The Romulan Republic]

Their are a lot of things that are more worthy of the attention and money, some of which are neglected. But I've got to admit that their's something about this idea that's catchy, and if they pull it off it'll bring in a lot of money through tourism.

[PREDATOR490]

A) While the idea is interesting I think the money could be better put to use elsewhere

B) No chance you are going to raise 2 billion within 60 days

C) This project seems woefully lacking on how they managed to come up with the numbers.

"In order to realise this amazing dream, we have estimated our required budget to be in the region of £1.85bn. The vast majority of this expense would cover building costs - £15m for land, £188m for labour and £1.4bn for material. The remainder of the money will be invested in maintenance and public services until the year 2053.

These numbers seem low for a project that is trying to replicate an entire city sized castle. Even at a significantly reduced scale, this would be impractical to build. Although I am curious to know if it would be possible for the modern world to pull it off and if LOTR could be reasonably expect to pull it off with their technology without magic bullshit.

[Simon_Jester]

I think they may have gotten the "how much money we need for building materials" right. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of provision for labor, and very little for things like legal issues, environmental impact statements, and the like.

188 million pounds is enough money to pay, oh, ten thousand construction workers for a year? Something on the order of that. That's plenty of manpower to build a castle, but not to build a city, I think.

[Lord Revan]

not mention that unless they find a suitble hill they'll have build that one too, I mean the Rohan capital was actually built to lifesized on an actual New Zealand hill and it's tiny compared to the film version of Minas Tirith.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yeah, that would be a problem.

Still, it would be amazing if their actually was a life-sized Minas Tirith replica that you could walk around in.

Edit: Also, to give an idea of the scale of this, while I don't know the exact size of the movie version, I believe I read that the book version is 700 feet from the ground to the uppermost level of the city and a thousand feet from the ground to the top of the central citidel.

[Eleas]

188 million pounds is enough money to pay, oh, ten thousand construction workers for a year? Something on the order of that. That's plenty of manpower to build a castle, but not to build a city, I think.

Modern construction tools are a wonderful thing, though. I seem to recall CastleMagic in Idaho building full-sized castles on a crew of five.

[Darth Tanner]

Just build a massive concrete extension to the Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy to create the sticking out mountain ledge bit and your job done. It being a world heritage site might be a slight issue.

I would have thought building a couple of hobbit holes and getting some of the interior sets recreated would be a much more realistic plan - the Harry Potter studios is a roaring success in London so something similar but with LotR would be great but I guess this is more a theoretical proposal than something they actually want to do.

[PREDATOR490]

A full scale Minas Tirith would be taller than Edinburgh castle, bigger than Winsdor and the cost puts it twice as much as the Wembley Stadium. The major issue is what scaling are they going to use and what exactly are they filling it with.

[Me2005]

A full scale Minas Tirith would be taller than Edinburgh castle, bigger than Winsdor and the cost puts it twice as much as the Wembley Stadium. The major issue is what scaling are they going to use and what exactly are they filling it with.

As for filling it, I've seen several proposals for 'new towns' like this where the initial money goes toward the concept, the groundwork, the utilities, and that kind of thing. The people who come to live and work in it pay to build their own buildings and there is usually some kind of design standard they have to stick to. Usually they are on a smaller, more sensible scale though.

[Iroscato]

Why...why are people talking about it as if it's anything other than a pisstake?
They need to raise 1.85 BILLION POUNDS. It is not a serious endevour.

[Bernkastel]

Because.... Don't shit on our dreams, you meanie!

Seriously though, it is interesting to consider how such a project could be done.

[Simon_Jester]

It is at least believable that you could get two million people to donate a few thousand dollars to such a project, over time. Doing it in a couple of months is borderline unthinkable.

[Joun_Lord]

I think only trying to rely on crowdfunding and in such a short amount of time will kill this.

If they had a more reasonable number over a larger period of time this might be more feasible. It would be even more feasible if this was a combo crowdfunded/investor funded thing. Talk to whoever owns the right to LOTR and see about setting up a partnership. Look for some local and international sponsors. Getting enough crowdfunding would show that there is enough interest in this to make this more appealing to investors.

With them asking for billions though most people are going to pass this up as either a crank or the highly unrealistic goal that it is. If they were asking for like 5 million as an initial goal with possible later campaigns it would probably get funded and will show investors there is interest.

[Solauren]

This is not meant to succeed. It's a stunt, nothing more.

And even if it did, let's face facts. If you suddenly got 2 billion in your bank account, wouldn't you be fleeing to a country without extradition treaties?

[Eleas]

I just wonder how much of the cost would go to erecting the mountain ridge behind it.

[Zixinus]

I sincerely wonder what the hell will they do if they actually manage to build the thing. Start an amusement park? Rent it to... who? What?

[Iroscato]

I sincerely wonder what the hell will they do if they actually manage to build the thing. Start an amusement park? Rent it to... who? What?

I think the idea is to have hundreds of premium-priced apartments and properties. They essentially want to create a living, functioning city - except they won't because it costs £2 billion and will never, ever be built.
Were I a multi-billionaire...I may well be tempted, after I get my private space exploration company built up.

[Borgholio]

It would have been a much better idea to go with a Shire theme instead. You could market it to environmentalists, since these would be very energy-efficient homes by their very nature (green roofs and all).

[Iroscato]

It would have been a much better idea to go with a Shire theme instead. You could market it to environmentalists, since these would be very energy-efficient homes by their very nature (green roofs and all).

Well, at least they didn't try recreating Mordor, complete with mile-high Barad-Dur and flaming Great Eye. Give them some credit for subtlety

[Purple]

It would have been a much better idea to go with a Shire theme instead. You could market it to environmentalists, since these would be very energy-efficient homes by their very nature (green roofs and all).

Well, at least they didn't try recreating Mordor, complete with mile-high Barad-Dur and flaming Great Eye. Give them some credit for subtlety

Now I'd pay to live there!

[Batman]

Plenty of environments like Mordor in the real world. I'm sure the people forced to live there would be happy to take your money.