Slashdot Mirror
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?"
This is pretty much going the same direction as Star Wars⦠Eventually we will see the âoeSuper Duper Directorâ(TM)s Cut Boxed Set With Special Commentary And New CGI Effects!â
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
. . .for the 9 feature-length part film adaptation of the epic tale of Peter Jackson's Tolkien film projects.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Each one of the first three films should have been a trilogy if a book shorter than any of the three Lord of the Rings novels gets three films.
Based on previous works, "Lord of the Rings" in particular, I'd say "as much as you can give us!". And by that I mean that they could cut The Hobbit into 10 pieces and I'd still be thrilled. Even with 3 movies, "Lord of the Rings" was missing too much.
that they were even going to span it across 2 movies until now. Jesus christ! I'll watch them all though and cry all the way to the bank. I'm sure it'll be worth it though. Besides that funky FPS that looks like it's an old BBC theatrical performance.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I like The Hobbit, but it's not an epic like The Lord of the Rings is. It's not supposed to be an epic. It's a self-contained, medium-sized story, with a fairly classic narrative arc. It makes no sense to tell the story in installments. The first 1/3 of the Hobbit isn't a film! There is one fairly straightforward journey, a climax, a denouement. The book is circa 300 pages, not circa 1000 like LoTR is.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Just wait 'till he gets his hands on the Silmarillion. It would open the door to a decade+ soap opera television for geeks!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Edit: So after RTFA it looks like the third movie will be stuff gleaned from Tolkien's other works, not anything that actually occurs in the novel The Hobbit.
21st Century Renaissance Man
"Tim, Tim Benzedrine!
Hash! Boo! Valvoline!
Clean! Clean! Clean for Gene!
First, second, neutral, park,
Hie thee hence, you leafy narc!
Bullshit. The story of Turin would make a damned good movie, though some might not like the ending quite so much. The Fall of Gondolin is pretty good too.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yep, this is starting to reek of yes-men and greed, not necessarily a good foundation for great movies. Jackson has performed well this far so I'm hoping, but this is where I start tuning down my expectations.
Agreed. Two would have been enough. Tolkein wrote it as a standalone story in one volume. It doesn't need anything else. I think PJ is starting to like the smell of his own flatus so much that he doesn't want to stop eating beans, so to speak.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
I was wary about stretching it into 2 movies. Its not that long of a book, not much actually happens. 3 movies is just a money grab by the studio.
I wasn't worried about that until I heard the titles for the three movies:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They only have the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by way of Saul Zaentz who purchased the rights back in the 70s. I'm pretty sure that the rights to everything outside of those specific books still rests in the hands of the Tolkien estate, and if Christopher Tolkien were going to sell the film rights to the rest of the material, he probably would have done it already (he's gone on record as not being happy with the films, and had to sue New Line in order to get their royalties from the films.)
If they're going to make 3 Tolkien films, New Line/Jackson's hands are pretty much tied to events in and those surrounding The Hobbit.
Edit: So after RTFA it looks like the third movie will be stuff gleaned from Tolkien's other works, not anything that actually occurs in the novel The Hobbit.
The only interesting thing is whether it'll feature Derek.
I wasn't worried about that until I heard the titles for the three movies:
The Hobbit
The Hobbit Reloaded
The Hobbit Revolutions
It could be worse. Imagine:
Hobbit: The Quickening
Just The Silmarillion. Is that really too much to ask?
In an unrelated note, if anyone has a mop, I accidentally dripped sarcasm all over the floor and need to clean it up.
If you take the stuff from the Silmarillion, you probably have enough for a couple hundred movies.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Given how Peter Jackson treated LOTR, taking only the outlines and filling them in with his own imagination, the Silmarillion seems like the perfect source for him. It would save him the trouble of having to throw out all the good stuff.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I understood the rational behind two movies; the Hobbit is pretty condensed and there is no lack of fans that will appreciate the depths explored with sufficient screen time. Three movies seems excessive but Peter did right by LOTR so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
It could be good if the net result is three reasonably sized movies instead of a pair of 235 minute blood clotting epics. We humans are really not meant to stare at screens that long.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The Hobbit was written as a children's book - a pleasant read and not too scary, with plenty of humor especially at the beginning. Jackson seemed to have a really difficult time with the lighthearted parts of LOTR. The reunion with Frodo at Rivendell is cringe-inducing. I wish they had asked someone else to do this - perhaps whoever directed the first Harry Potter movie. Jackson did a great job with bringing Middle-Earth to life in sets and costumes, but that hurdle has largely been crossed. The Hobbit needs someone who can take the sets and costumes and tell a story.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Completely agree, give as many intellectual arguments and mention how it did not include some specific scene important for the plot as much as you like but the movies were good and did not really change anything. The Orcs were not turned into mutants from Mars or aliens, so personally I thought a good job was done. Until given direct evidence that these movies are bad I am very much looking forward to them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Naah, more like:
The Hobbit: The Ca$hening
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
I felt. . .as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror. . .
Alien vs. Fredy Krueger vs. the Hobbit
Indeed, and that's why one was already made.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I disagree. I read The Hobbit about 30 years ago and remembered it as a small book that did not take long to read.
Recently I picked the book up to read it again before the movie and was surprised at how much actually happens in the book. I have no problem believing that there are three movies worth of material in the book.
1. The LOTR movies were overall great. Especially the first one.
2. The movies also had some flaws.
3. Those flaws were when the original story was messed with, for example the disasters of messing with Faramir's character, and the timeline of the reforging of the sword and the casting of Gimli as Jar Jar Binks.
4. Jackson is going to take far more liberties with the story this time. After all he now has 3 films to fill with material and THIRTEEN dwarves to call on for comic relief. Just imagine - Jar Jar Binks times 13.
5. This could be as bad as Star Wars I-III.
6. Profit!!!
As a matter of fact, I don't believe it will be a travesty. But I hold the (apparently) unpopular opinion that the LOTR movies were an excellent adaptation of the books - not a perfect mirror of them, but the best that could possibly be done when going from printed page to movie screen. Because of that opinion, I'm willing to hope that The Hobbit, as a movie, is the same kind of excellent adaptation.
That said, I don't know where they're going to get three movies worth of material and retain the pacing that worked well for LOTR.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The funny thing is that it wasn't just Saul Zaentz and the Tolkien Estate that had to sue to get all the money they were supposed to, but also Peter Jackson.
I would say that if Peter Jackson had exhibited a history of trying to wring cash out of a franchise with new, but inferior material and unnecessary revisions (*cough*Lucas*cough*), and to my knowledge, that hasn't happened, has it?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The movies didn't make much money. Something about sets burning in Uganda.
Also they weren't popular. Hardly anybody saw them more than five or six times. And nobody bought all of the DVD sets.
Fair disclosure, I think I saw them once in the theaters, I own the DVDs which I bought off clearance.
Really, they probably lost money.
Because my old Ballantine Books paper back version is 287 pages...
The Hobbit: The Search For Smaug.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
On the other hand, in The Hobbit the dwarves really are comical and meant to be laughed at. It's a children's book after all. Bilbo was the sensible one in many ways. Thorin was the most level headed but even he was made to look silly in many places.
Any book that doesn't involve a Bearenstine bear is hard to contain in a 2hr movie. The fact that we're so used to directors making shrunken heads out of some of the best literary works and think that's acceptable is a sad thing. The Hobbit has 19 chapters, and I could easily see a movie taking an average of 30min each getting through them in detail. So that's 10hrs of material, easily.
If anything, the Lord of the Rings movies cut HUGE gaping swaths out of that story. Remember Tom Bombadil? He was one of the most identifiable characters in those books and was replaced in the movie with about a 20second sequence where strider just hands the hobbits a bunch of magic swords. It's a sad thing. Would people have tolerated it being broken up into 10 or more movies? No... but it's success is what's allowing Jackson to expand on the Hobbit. Which is a good thing, because, in my not so humble opinion, The Hobbit is one of the best printed works in human history. I'm glad they are doing this. The only thing that would make me more happy would be a big budget "Band of Brothers" style series. If we're lucky, maybe that's what they'll do with the Silmarillion.
One 2-3 hour film would have been enough. It's a children's book, it's not an epic.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
If anything, the Lord of the Rings movies cut HUGE gaping swaths out of that story. Remember Tom Bombadil?
Tom Bombadil never made much sense in the book and would have been a huge plot hole to movie audiences.
Much like how Dobby had to die before the final battle in the final Harry Potter book, Tom Bombadil needed to be gone in such a way that he couldn't help (and the "not wanting to" from the book doesn't really hold up). This way, we avoid having a being of essentially limitless power alive and doing nothing while our much less powerful heroes struggle with their quest. The easiest way to do this in the LotR movies was to just not introduce him in the first place.
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.
I went back and watched the LOTR movies again recently. This time at home on a smaller screen, so the pyrotechnics and CGI doesn't dazzle you as much and you are more focused on the story or characters. And I realized that when I watched the movies in a cinema, I was inserting the real story in between the great CGI rather than focusing too much on the story as Jackson presented it. When you focus on the story as it is in the movies, you realize how badly Jackson has bastardized the story and every single important character. It's nor just Gimli, the way Elrond and Aragorn are fundamentally altered is incredible. I mean, I understand the challenges of bringing the story into the form of a movie, but this was clearly a simplified, significantly altered interpretation of the story. And it was all done to make sure it fits well worn hollywood tropes that have proved to be popular in the past. And judging by how much money the movies made, they succeeded brilliantly. But there were so many artistic compromises made, that I can't help but be cynical when Jackson seems to suggest that he is making three movies to try and present more of Tolkien's world. He already had a chance to present Tolkien's world, and he took the more commercially viable option. This is all about milking the cash cow and earning billions.
Obviously you're right that it would have been a plot hole for the movie audience, since you demonstrated exactly how Bombadil would have been understood by that audience.
Those of us who would have liked to see Bombadil have a different understanding of him. He's there for a three reasons.
One, and I think most importantly, he's there as a semi-disposable character to bail the hobbits out when they get into trouble. This is their rite of passage. The world is a dangerous place, the hobbits are fleeing from danger into danger, and they need help, and in the absence of Gandalf, Bombadil is the first helper after they've left the Shire. He's foreshadowing Aragorn's help, and later the Nine Walkers. Your complaint is that he's overpowered to do that job, and that may be, but that's not all he's good for, and I don't think he's quite the disturbing McGuffin you think he is. More on that later.
Second, he's there for a sense of age and history. If you've read the Silmarillion, you have that sense of history, but most people haven't and don't. Bombadil is the first of several things sprinkled through LoTR to give that sense, and he's the only one still present in the world. He's there to give a sense that even though the elves are ancient compared to men, there is something in the world yet more ancient. He's there to lend a glimpse of eternity, to hint that this too shall pass.
Third, he's there for a sense of the alien, the different. He's there to provide the perspective that, while the conflict over the Ring feels epic to everyone involved, there are those who are not involved, who are so different that they don't even understand the fuss. The discussion about Bombadil at the council especially made it clear that, while Bombadil is humanoid, he is in no way human. The Council worries out loud that if given custody of the Ring, he'd lose it through sheer carelessness.
This is where your concerns about the plot hole are a little out of place. Bombadil is alien in the same way that Caradras is alien, and can be considered the benevolent foil to the malevolence of Caradras. He and Caradras both possess tremendous power, but it is a non-mobile elemental sort of power, enormous in terms of sheer strength (Gandalf doesn't even consider challenging Caradras when it resists the Fellowship), but indifferent to the Ring itself, and it is a power that does not move around in the world or participate in it. Each helps or hinders the progress of the Ring when the Ring comes near for reasons of their own that are more about their fundamental natures than anything to do with the Ring.
This is also one of the additional points about the movie that irritate the crap out of aficionados. Not only did Peter Jackson think that movie audiences couldn't understand Bombadil (apparently correctly), he also decided they couldn't understand Caradras, so he introduced the lame sequence where the trouble in the mountains was brought on by Saruman. The cure is worse than the disease. Not only did Saruman not know for sure what the Fellowship was up to, he was vague about where they were and what their numbers were. That's how the whole mistaken identity bit with Pippin and Merry happens.
More to the point, Saruman isn't powerful enough to cause that sort of trouble for a party escorted by Gandalf. In the books, Gandalf and Saruman always carefully step around each other once Saruman fails to convert Gandalf to his cause, and Gandalf isn't involved in either Saruman's downfall or his death. Following directly on from that point, Saruman simply isn't that powerful period. Everything about the Tolkien mythos is about the the decline and fall of basically everything. Everything is downhill, and Saruman (and indeed, Gandalf), are both very much at the low end of that long decline. Bombadil and Caradras are both ancient and therefore at the high end of the power curve. Gandalf and Saruman are both much younger, therefore much less powerful.
So the loss of Bombadil is, I think, directly related to the loss of Caradras, and both losses are unfortunate for many reasons.
If you go past the Silmarillion proper, I think the Atalante (Fall of Numenor) would make a very impressive prequel to LotR.
I think you mean Akallabeth (yeah I know, same meaning, different language, but that's what the book is called).
And I agree, it would make for an awesome prequel. The climax certainly has the greatest special effects potential of any moment in the history of Ea. I would love to see the Bending of the World on screen, watch the seas torn asunder and Numenor fall into them as Aman floats off into the distant stars along the Straight Path, and the camera slowly pulls back high over Endor to show the curvature of the newly-shaped world.
I would make the Akallabeth the centerpiece of a prequel trilogy pulling from the Silmarillion and other supplemental materials. I would tell it in reverse order, tied together by a framing story of Aragon explaining to his son Eldarion the history of Arnor (as they reestablish that kingdom in the early Fourth Era), and from there the history of Numenor, and before that the start of the line of high Men.
The first part would be predominantly about the downfall of Arnor and the battles against the Witch-King of Angmar, culminating in the line of kings becoming the Rangers of the North. That way we get to see familiar peoples and a familiar villain (the Lord of the Nazgul), and the early influence of the Rings of Power, tying it directly into the LotR. The prologue to this story would briefly tell of the history of how Arnor and Gondor were settled and how Arnor began to splinter prior to the Witch-King's attacks, much like the prologue to Fellowship tells of the Last Alliance and how the Ring was lost.
The second part would tell of the downfall of Numenor. This would get to feature Sauron as a prominent villain, in his fair form as Annatar, and so still have strong connections directly to LotR. It would of course culminate in the Bending of the World and the survival of Elendil (who would star) to found Arnor and Gondor. The prologue to this part would tell, if you'll note the pattern here, of how Numenor was given as a gift to the Edain, and how it slowly grew corrupt, before telling of its last days.
The third part would tell the tale of Earendil, culminating in the War of Wrath, and victory over Melkor, "ending" the trilogy on a high note despite it all generally being a bunch of downers. The prologue to this would of course establish how the silmarils were forged and stolen and the Sons of Feanor's quest for vengeance. Somewhere in there the story of Beren and Luthien would have to be told, to establish how Earendil gets his silmaril via his wife Elwing, Beren and Luthien's granddaughter; this could be an extended flashback recounted during Earendil and Elwing's courtship. Of course their sons Elrond and Elros will feature in here as well, establishing more familiar faces from LotR. In the epilogue Numenor is granted to the Edain for their help in the War of Wrath, with Elros as its first king, and the line of kings from Elros down through Elendil to our narrator Elessar (Aragorn) and his son Eldarion is briefly recounted, wrapping the whole story up; perhaps ending on a shot of the Evening Star as their day concludes, and Earendil continues to sail the sky with his silmaril shining bright.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I think you misunderstood what Bombadil represented. Remember the theme of LotR is about resisting the industrial revolution and keeping a more natural, agrarian lifestyle. Bombadil represents the force of Nature. Nature is impartial and cares neither way whether young species like humans kill themselves off. The world will continue with or without them. There's no reason to get involved in petty squabbles lasting a few hundred years when there are millenia of plant and stone to tend and watch.
He was more contradictory that he bothered to save the hobbits from the barrow wights. Yet that, too, was his nature - to be contradictory and do things on a whim.
I do agree general audiences would not have understood, and sadly, Jackson is catering all of these movies to the non-reading masses.