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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?"
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.
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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.
I think the key is that they are going outside the pages of the Hobbit to get a third film. Which is not to say they're going outside Tolkien's writings, it's just that they're mining the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and the last chapter of the Silmarillion on the War of the Rings which covers Sauron's early rise as the Necromancer of Dol Guldur and the battles fought by Gandlaf, Saruman, Elrond and Galadriel against him at that time. This is very tangentially touched upon in the Hobbit -- but it is a narrow story told from Bilbo's point of view -- but there's plenty of story there if they wish to fill it in as a separate part that helps fill the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
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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. . . .
Will we get a version where Frodo shoots first?
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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
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.
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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.
Peter Jackson managed to take the LOTR trilogy and make it a critical and popular success, winning both box office awards AND the OSCAR for BEST PICTURE. Let me repeat that--he took a trilogy of orcs, elves, dwarves, and hobbits and managed to win an academy award for best picture. That isn't just great film making--that is a freaking miracle
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.
You're modded as funny, but we already have a version where Frodo pushes Gollum (instead of Gollum dancing happily to the edge).
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.