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Tolkien Enterprises To Film Hobbit With Jackson?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rumors-keep-milling dept.

cyclomedia writes "TheOneRing.Net has a new scoop on the ongoing Hobbit Movie saga, sourced from elbenwald.de. Apparently the rights to make the Hobbit film fall back to Saul Zaentz 'next year.' He claims that, under their stewardship, The Hobbit will 'definitely be shot by Peter Jackson.' For the whippersnappers amongst you: Mr. Zaentz is the head honcho of Tolkien Enterprises, which originally acquired exclusive rights to productions of the LOTR and Hobbit material in 1976, prior to overseeing the Bakshi animated version of LOTR."

10 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Does this explain New Line's decision? by Xest · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I guess this is perhaps why New Line didn't want to hang around for Jackson any longer and why they sounded in such a rush to get it started in their statements?

    How does film licensing work, if New Line doesn't finish the film by the time Tolkien enterprises gets the license back are they allowed to publish it still or do they lose all rights to it?

    1. Re:Does this explain New Line's decision? by Sv-Manowar · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I may be wrong, but it is my understanding that "Tolkien Enterprises" hold the rights to the films (LOTR, Hobbit etc) and were paid by New Line in order to grant them a license to create them (evidently this would have been for a large sum of money and all of the films at once, rather than licensing each individual one at a time as it would have given either side a chance to renegotiate based on the success/failure of what was release). This deal would have been signed with a clause saying that it "ends" in X amount of years, so that Tolkien Enterprises take back the rights and can either produce it themselves or relicense it to another studio in the case of New Line not producing the film in time, putting it on the backburner or just deciding not to work on it for monetary/staff reasons (such as the dispute with Peter Jackson now).

      If New Line do not get production underway pretty soon, they risk the rights being taken away from them and I have a feeling that is the primary reason why they are making noise about moving on without Peter Jackson, because evidently they do not want to stop fighting the lawsuit but that is probably the only way it could happen any time soon. What they risk is the backlash that is beginning now, with stars such as Ian Mckellen expressing "dissapointment" at the Jackson scenario, I have a feeling that New Line will run into some problems getting a number of the actors and crew back on board without the man who practically 'made' the franchise what it is.

      --
      Business Voyeur
    2. Re:Does this explain New Line's decision? by ronanbear · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's pretty standard in the film industry. New Line took huge risks by funding 3 movies at once but they also made a lot more money. It was a complicated deal that created opportunities to fiddle the books. They didn't just stiff Jackson though. Tolkien Enterprises also sued New Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_Enterprises for $20m.

      The details of the deal aren't too well known. In fact Jackson wasn't aware until recently that the rights would expire at all. It's hard to speculate but it appears that New Line still have time to make the Hobbit and the deal should cover some overrun so that work can still continue on an unfinished project.

      After that the rights revert to Tolkien Enterprises so unless there's a clause in the contract that stops Tolkien Enterprises from reshooting the Hobbit immediately it's entirely possible that Jackson could make another version within a year or two (or within months if they were to write the script and do preproduction before they acquire the rights).

      A New Line Hobbit film is likely to be profitable so there's a good chance they might try that and hope that Jackson doesn't want to take the risk to compete with a later attempt.

      --
      the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
    3. Re:Does this explain New Line's decision? by ubernostrum · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A New Line Hobbit film is likely to be profitable so there's a good chance they might try that and hope that Jackson doesn't want to take the risk to compete with a later attempt.

      Except, in a classic case of overly-complex intellectual property laws, New Line doesn't own distribution rights to The Hobbit. MGM does. Which means New Line could make the film, they just couldn't send it out to any theaters without MGM's permission. And MGM is saying that "the matter of Peter Jackson directing 'The Hobbit' films is far from closed."

  2. Rights expiring don't mean much... by payndz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...if New Line can *start* production before the date of expiry. I can think of two examples off the top of my head of movies which were rushed into production before the film rights expired - Roger Corman's version of The Fantastic Four (which admittedly was never released), and Queen Of The Damned - made by Warner Bros, who also own New Line. I'm sure there are others.

    Whether New Line would do this depends entirely on their prediction of profit vs loss. If they think enough people will go and see a Hobbit film even without Jackson for them to get a good enough return on investment, they could well rush a film into production, and let their lawyers handle Zaentz's objections.

    --
    You must think in Russian.
  3. Re:Hooray! by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why is this a troll? It's one thing to edit and abridge a story in order to make it fit a motion picture format. It's another thing entirely to take huge liberties with the characters and create fictitious events in order to justify these "new" characters. Some of the greatest drama in Return of the King was reduced to petty bickering between the main characters - in order to leave more room for the "special effects".

          I also shudder to think to what they will do to The Hobbit.

    --
    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  4. Should PJ Direct "The Hobbit" in the First Place? by Jupiter+Jones · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Now I really, really liked the LOTR movies a lot. "Braindead" was a hoot, and "Heavenly Creatures" was absolutely brilliant. But those are all films with a very different story and tone than "The Hobbit".

    So is Jackson really the best person to get for what is, after all, a "lighter" work? There are, after all, other directors who would probably do a great job with "The Hobbit", and maybe a better one too. (Brad Bird might be an interesting choice, f'rinstance.)

    (At this point, I had a great argument about how you wouldn't get the guy who directed "Casino Royale" to do "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" simply because both books were written by Ian Fleming. Then I discovered that they actually did do that back in the 60's. Still... you get my point.)

      - Jeff

  5. Peter Jackson should take care by Robotech_Master · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If Peter Jackson has anything to do with Saul Zaentz, he should take care. Zaentz treated a certain other Peter rather poorly in conjunction with the production of the Lord of the Rings animated film.

    --
    Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
  6. Re:Hooray! by RKThoadan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I really thought that the Faramir part of the movie was very poorly done. I can understand wanting to make Faramir more of an obstacle than the free pass that he was, but they did it so horribly that I think it was the wrong call. Faramir's 'conversion' just didn't work. I mean Frodo almost hands the ring over to the Chief Nazgul and this somehow convinces Faramir that he's the right person to try to take the ring straight into Mordor? Now, if he had cold-cocked Frodo and handed the ring off to Sam I might have believed it.

    However, on the whole I think PJ did a darn good job with the books and I want to see him do the Hobbit. It may have been written as a childrens book, but there is so much of a dark side to it that I think it could actually be a much darker and scarier movie than LOTR. It will be interesting to see how they handle the elves in that one, since they aren't exactly the good guys.

  7. Re:Hooray! by owlnation · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've never understood the frequent "but the film makers changed the story wah wah wah" complaint - for any movie, not just LoTR.

    Film is Film, TV is TV, Books are Books, Opera is Opera, etc etc... it is near impossible to adapt a book or a play to the big screen without changing elements - for a whole variety of reasons. For example, the drama of a play is delivered by actors who are so far away from their audience that subtle gestures HAVE to be replaced by dialogue, for a movie you can lose all that dialogue and replace it with close-ups and reaction shots. Books can allow characters to have narration or internal monologues which invariably looks cheesy on the big screen. The rhythm, cadence and pacing of a book is usually radically different from the needs of a movie.

    They are NOT the same. They will NEVER be the same. Whether they are better or worse is subjective. They give out oscars for screen adaptations for a reason. It is damn hard.

    Feel free to compare apples to apples - i.e. it is perfectly valid to compare a remake with the original film, but comparing film to book is not necessarily valid. The important thing to realize is that they are NOT mutually destructive. You actually can enjoy the book and also enjoy the movie. Or only one of them if you dislike the other. You lose nothing.

    And...a bad film version will not mean that there can never be another film version.