Please list where in _The Hobbit_ or the LotR Trilogy that was spelled out.
No one brought up the Eagles once at the Council of Elrond, just that the One Ring would corrupt anyone who used it, and should be tossed in Mount Doom.
And that the Ring Bearer would walk it there with his companions.
As you noted, debating interpretations of Tolkien is really a diversion from this thread.
The relevance is, Disney and Henson each have their own world views, which are both rather optimistic. Tolkien is more of a conservative than either, but actually, at least the way I read Tolkien, his approach to morality and justice actually could resonate very strongly with both the classic Walt Disney and Jim Henson's Beatnik optimism. Both American artistes could actually look pretty deep darkness right in the eye without flinching or painting it over--consider how terrifying aspects of Snow White, Pinocchio or Bambi were.
(An aside of sorts--my 4 year old niece just dug up a Disney marketed book of little stories about cute pets for Disney princesses. The first one, about a doggie for Cinderella (all of these "stories" are after "they lived happily ever after" and meant to be part of it) gave me a terrible saccharine burn reading it to my niece--the "story" had no darkness to it, no moral content, and in fact I was nauseated by the frank greed and shallowness of what I came to revile as "The Preppy Little Puppy." Fortunately for my sanity and ability to keep my niece happy, the other stories had pups and kittens and bunnies and a panda who all had a bit more pizzazz, and just a bit of usefulness, or anyway some redeeming features or frank gluttony in one case. I was yearning for a troll or ogre or ravening wolf or something, especially in that first so-called "story" of vapid shallowness. I can quite see why Tolkien would cringe at the mere notion of Disney getting anywhere near his hobbits, let alone the Great Matter of the Silmarils).
Of SF writers I am quite the Phillip K Dick fan.
Ah, my first shoot from the hip response was that Dick is diametrically opposite the Disney world view, though perhaps Henson could work with it. But actually PKD was quite the moralist too, in his own way, and had some surprisingly conservative views too on some subjects anyway.
I'd say though that overall, with varying degrees of fidelity, Dick has been fairly well served by Hollywood OTL. There are aspects of
Blade Runner some critics thought Dick would violently object to, but the way
A Scanner Darkly was handled seems deeply faithful to the book I remember reading. There have been lots of movies, mostly quite popular, that more or less managed to get at least some of Dick's sensibilities across. Dick to me is on the spectrum of SF writers that literature critics and English teachers like--to my mind, the most egregiously overpraised by this faction generally tone deaf to what makes Science Fiction science fiction is Ray Bradbury, but that could also be a generational thing, one doesn't hear him praised so much nowadays. Dick I think lived in his own world, which fortunately for SF was also a very SF world, on his own terms--I'm trying to say I don't think of Ray Bradbury as much of a science fiction writer but I sure do think PKD was one. Mind I have been rather hit and miss in my appreciation of his books and stories--some I have devoured and love passionately, others I have struggled through and often given up on. I'm never quite sure if I actually got the end of The Man In the High Castle or not--which is especially frustrating as I deeply bought into about 95 percent of it, it moved brilliantly and compellingly....then I am not actually sure what actually happens at the end of it (beyond Mr Tagomi giving the Nazis a categorical "no" on turning over yet more Jews to the Gestapo). But you know, there are other authors some of whose books I love fiercely, like say CJ Cherryh, who write other books I just can't make head or tail of.
Anyway I think for whatever reason, maybe that his kind of beatnikism ("flipped out hippie," he called himself in praising Robert Heinlein's personal generosity to him on one occasion) overlaps the general kind of arty mentality that works in Hollywood, so these artistes are by happy accident on a similar wavelength, I think Hollywood on the whole has worked well with his oeuvre. Perhaps he was merely prophetic of a general mood and mentality that would resonate with the post-1980 world in general.
Meanwhile I don't think Disney can touch
A Scanner Darkly, not and remain distinctly Disney. But I do think the people who did handle it OTL did it particularly well, at least from the point of view of faithfully capturing Dick's style and intent--his daughter in the audio commentary thought so too.
Fortunately I don't think this is zero sum; if Disney can build up a platform for somewhat more, shall we say, conventional, SF mentality (Heinlein for instance) it might just increase the scope for the more outre aspects of SF that Disney cannot touch, even via Henson bridging it for them a bit, with other producers. I don't think it would suck any oxygen away from the OTL successes of Dick adaptions, and might open the way for even weirder stuff.