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Peter Jackson Announces Third Hobbit Movie
eldavojohn writes "Unless his Facebook account has been hacked, Peter Jackson has announced a third movie for The Hobbit series: 'So, without further ado and on behalf of New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Wingnut Films, and the entire cast and crew of The Hobbit films, I'd like to announce that two films will become three.' Other sites are confirming this while Variety notes that filming has been wrapped on the first two so doing a third film will require a restart to all of that effort including re-negotiations with rights holders and acting schedules. **potential spoiler alert** From Peter Jackson's announcement: 'We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance.' How much of Middle Earth would you like to see on film?"
Honestly there's a whole lot of the Tolkien universe left to go and I honestly don't mind them making movies out of it; however, I do wish that they wouldn't drag the Hobbit out so much, especially when there're stories such as the Silmarillion that would be incredibly amazing to see done.
Agreed, there's a lot of the Tolkien universe than most people know about. But I don't think the idea is to drag the novel The Hobbit out to three movies. I've read elsewhere that the intent is to dip into the LOTR appendices and cover the larger history leading up to Fellowship of the Ring. The Hobbit was a child's story told from Bilbo's point of view. I think Jackson has something larger in mind. Tolkien reportedly had something larger in mind, and had started to re-write the story partially contained in The Hobbit, but never finished it.
Unfortunately Jackson doesn't have rights to the Quest of Erebor -- that's owned by Tolkien's son Christopher, and he appears to be completely opposed to any film based on his father's work. So all they have is the rights that Tolkien sold when he was alive -- The Hobbit and LOTR. Fortunately, a lot of the earlier story is contained in the part at the end of LOTR that almost nobody read.
I think the main difference between this and Star Wars is that Jackson is not pulling the story out of his ass. At least, not all of it.
As to The Silmarillion.... I'm sorry, it put me to sleep. And I'm saying this from the standpoint of having read every word of LOTR several times, including the appendices. From a storytelling standpoint, it was more interesting to have a story set in the last days of that age, where heroic and villainous acts are overshadowed by the monstrous acts of an earlier time, and characters struggle amid the tired ruins of a world that contained characters so much larger than they.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
At this point, it's pretty obvious that they aren't sticking to things that were in the books. They're making up new material, new stories. It was a stretch to make The Hobbit into two movies (they were already going to add at least half a movie of new material, probably closer to a full movie). But three? They're making shit up. Totally new material.
Tolkien would probably be happy about that. I'd ask him myself, but... you know...
Tolkien was a student of myths and legends, and of languages. He was obsessed with the interplay between languages and stories, and held a theory that the original primary purpose of language was to tell stories and legends. He thought any language without legends was a dead language. He didn't invent Elvish to help tell the LotR stories - he invented the Lord of the Rings to complete his languages. It was a bit of a linguistic experiment to him, actually.
Tolkien believed in the old way of stories, of men telling tales around a campfire, like the poets and bards of old. He tried to replicate that in his classroom (reading Beowulf et al. in the original languages). And possibly the most important difference between modern stories and ancient tales is that, in the old way, you can change it. You can change words, change stories, add verses, remove characters. You aren't supposed to do that with modern stories. Even in the fanfic culture, you generally don't take the original story and throw in a new subplot, new people, new places.
Tolkien would be happy to know that his story has become legend in that aspect, that his story lives not just as words on paper, but as a living, changing story.
Doesn't mean I myself agree with this - I'm "cautiously reserving judgement until the actual work is shown", neither immediately loving it nor already hating it. But I think Tolkien would be happy.