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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?"
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
That's just standard studio bullshit to capitalize as much as possible on the franchise. You're going to see that with any property.
I'd be much more worried if Peter Jackson goes batshit insane and gives us an uninspired story with shallow and boring characters. Then it would be going in the same direction as Star Wars.
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.
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.
Will we get a version where Frodo shoots first?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I want to see the Silmarillion but in Series format (like Game of Thrones or similar). It is long enough for at lest 4 or 5 seasons of 8-10 episodes each. I would really look forward to watch that!
come on, the Silmarillion is hardly a story. its much more like an appendix or as wikipedia puts it a legendarium. you couldnt make that a coherent movie any more than you could make the entire bible a single movie. Maybe they could do it like the Animatrix, which would be FREAKING SWEET!
i'm not sure i agree that there is that much more of the Tolkien universe to get through. in that, there is depth, but we are about out of breadth.
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.
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.
Alien vs. Fredy Krueger vs. the Hobbit
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!!!
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.
The Silmarillion was designed by Tolkien to mimic the Bible, as a collection of prose, verse, homilies, letters, etc.
However, as a jumping off point for a whack of mini-series/TV series/made-for-streaming/etc. it's great material -- after all, it's what JRR used to build up his universe on which to build LoTR (I believe the Hobbit was already done by that point).
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.
come on, the Silmarillion is hardly a story. its much more like an appendix or as wikipedia puts it a legendarium. you couldnt make that a coherent movie any more than you could make the entire bible a single movie.
What are you talking about? Have you ever read it?
The rise of the races and the fall of the trees; the stories of Finwe, Feanor, etc; Beren and Luthie; Gondolin; Numenor; the wars of the first and second ages; and so on...
The Silmarillion is probably my favorite book of them all simply because of the epic scale of the stories that it tells, and it's the only one I've reread multiple times. The first time through it a lot of people get turned off by the very beginning, but honestly you can't stop there.
It transitions into very conventional storytelling pretty quickly and has a LOT to tell. I think it got much better the second time through because I wasn't having so much trouble keeping the names straight, and everything was much clearer.
It would make for some seriously epic movies imo. There's war, betrayal, and even romance on a MUCH larger scale than either the Hobbit or LotR.
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.
Well, perhaps. I see it as different parts of the same struggle.
In one of the appendices, (I don't have my copy in front of me, so this is from memory), Tolkien outlines what part the dwarves of The Lonely Mountain played in the War of the Ring, and how this occupied much of Sauron's forces, an added distraction away from the effort to destroy the ring. There was also something about the last existing Ring of the dwarves playing a part, I think indirectly leading to Gandalf's chance meeting with Thorin, which kicked off the events of The Hobbit. It was all tightly interconnected.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You're modded as funny, but we already have a version where Frodo pushes Gollum (instead of Gollum dancing happily to the edge).
You get the version where Bilbo wins the ring, and the version where Bilbo steals it. True to the source material.
Hey that gives me an idea.
You could turn the Scouring of the Shire into an action movie. Nicolas Cage could play Frodo, Amber Heard could play his love interest.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
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.