Though I can see Peter Jackson taking the Hobbit and turning it into two films, I was a bit skeptical that he could stretch it out to three. Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema have announced that Jackson will create a third Hobbit movie that will arrive in 2014.
For those who have watched the video diary, Jackson did state that there was a lot of extra footage, and with the other material that J.R.R. Tolkien had that did not appear in the novel, Jackson believes he can make a third engaging movie.
This announcement means that Jackson and crew (and actors) will head back to the studio to shoot more.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey arrives December 14, 2012, with the second movie hitting theaters December 13, 2013, and the final movie in the trilogy arriving in the Summer of 2014.
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He’s going to be vilified either way now – if the trilogy succeeds, it was just a cash grab by the studio. If not, they never should have extended the series beyond one movie, how could they add all this other junk that wasn’t in the book…
He did a great job on the LOTR series, he’ll do fine on The Hobbit. Just feel bad for him either way.
Interesting. I agree with the comment above. PJ will get crucified by Tolkien purists for this. But when you consider that they actually only filmed about a quarter of the LOTR, and he has all of Tolkien’s other works to draw upon, including the Silmarillion, there is plenty of material for a third movie. Besides, in The Hobbit, the journey home is barely touched upon, though Bilbo mentions having plenty of other adventures on the trip home. Which leads me to believe that the third movie will probably be about the “Back Again” portion of “There and Back Again”. If you watch the previous video blog from PJ, he mentions that the heirs of Tolkien were not happy with the LOTR films. Everything thing I’ve read seems to hint that they didn’t dislike the films themselves, but were unhappy about the way New Line Cinema used creative accounting to attempt to make it look like they had lost money on the movies instead of making hundreds of millions of dollars, in an attempt to cheat the Tolkien estate, as well as Peter Jackson, out of their fair share of the profits. (This appears to be an old story in Hollywood – the use of ‘creative’ bookkeeping to make millions of dollars in profits vanish into studio executive pockets.) I am willing to give Peter Jackson more than his fair share of the benefit of the doubt. He did a wonderful job on LOTR – which I had assumed was virtually unfilmable, especially in the light of the horrible abortions that Ralph Bacchi and Rankin Bass made of the property in the past.
From what I remember Christopher Tolkien hates the movies with a passion, but Royd, the great-grandson thought the world of Peter Jackson…
Christopher Tolken, is both blessed and cursed with childhood memories of his father reading to him and his brothers both The Hobbit and his other works. No movie or other interpretation can ever compete with those memories. I say blessed and cursed because most Tolkien fans would give their eye teeth to have J. R. R. Tolkein read The Hobbit to them. And I say cursed because nothing will ever live up to those special memories, no matter how hard Peter Jackson or anybody else may try. I just realized that Christopher Tolkien is 84, bless the man, so I am not going to be too hard on him. I wonder how many people there are still alive in the world who personally knew J. R. R. Tolkien?
It is indeed a surprise to see a third movie in the works.
I’m very hopeful it might include (for once) Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. There is by no means a shortage of material. I’m in about 1/4 of the way through “Shaping of Middle Earth” and just the stuff that was never used by Tolkien (Sr.) fills volumes. As far as PJ, he gets a pass from me. I can’t say I’m a fanatic (haven’t been to NZ to see the locations, for example) but I thought he did a marvellous job of moving the story along, paying homage where he could to bits of the story they left out. Also it would be fascinating to see what parts they think they can cobble together for a #3. I just hope they don’t need to spend a lot of time re-filming or editing films 1 & 2 as a set-up for the third.