Not to dispute your point for a moment, I've seen evidence that other things than movies can have that effect. I'm fairly active on the newsgroups at Steve Jackson Games, which, naturally, sometimes get onto discussions of fantasy. So I have seen a number of people who dislike Tolkien, or are mildly contemptuous of him, or don't get why anyone makes such a fuss about him—not from comparison with the films, but from comparison with more recent fantasy writers who are working in a genre he helped create, but whom they find more accessible. The expectations of fantasy supported by Terry Goodkind or Robert Jordan or their like seem to get in the way of people valuing Tolkien for what he was doing.