Talk Elections

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/30/peter-jackson-hobbit-three-films

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My poor, poor, poor childhood. What did it do to deserve this repeated mugging?

How can there conceivably be enough material in even The Hobbit plus all relevant portions of The History of Middle-Earth with Roverandom or something thrown in for good measure for a trilogy?

What's the big deal here? All the great trilogies have three parts.

Hobbit wasn't a trilogy. It was one book. And of course all great trilogies have three parts. That's the definition.

I'm beginning to feel a little bit excited about how awful this is going to be.

Meh, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about as close to an epic masterpiece as you can get. Gonna give him the benefit of the doubt on this.

Just wait until you see it in 48 fps!

Jackson also has access to Tolkein's original notes which I understand are very extensive. He's bringing in a lot of side material.

I wasn't aware there were notes that Christopher hadn't already published in History.

At this rate we'll never get another series of Sherlock

I wouldn't have thought so, because they've already finished the filming, so Freeman should be free for a new series regardless of whether there are two or three films.

Apparently the new stuff in the movies is Gandalf's campaign against the Necromancer, which was only an excuse to have the all-powerful wizard ditch Bilbo etc. in the book so they could be put in real danger.  Basically they're going to expand Gandalf's lengthy monologue in Fellowship of the Ring into actual action.

I have to agree with Lief on this. For better or worse, I trust Jackson not to ruin The Hobbit for me. xD

There isn't even material for two films, let alone three. A three part TV adaptation... possibly. But that's quite different. It's just not that sort of book, and what's so utterly alarming is that... urgh.

Even if that is so, the Hobbit is a children's book, not an epic anything. This is not actually a bad thing either, of course, but means that in order to be adapted successfully it requires a different approach.

I suppose what it might mean is that Jackson has been plundering Unfinished Tales.

I couldn't agree more.  It would have been better to make the LOR trilogy into something more like 4-6 films (though obviously that would be awkward in various ways as well) than to blow up the charming The Hobbit this way.

Hollywood has assumed the world's attention spans have completely died.   Epics like Lawrence of Arabia would have been cut as a trilogy today and even the original LOTR would probably have been 6 movies in the 2010s.

You'd need one (normal length movies) to do it justice, not that I assume Jackson could achieve that if he tried, just as LOTR would have needed to be twice the length it actually was (and all the invented crap cut out - and that's more than half of Jackson's second part).

The Silmarillion could potentially be excellent as a many-part TV thing, but that'll never happen in such a way as to do it justice.


I did like that part of that book, but it doesn't have anything at all in common with The Hobbit.

See, that's good in that I like a lot of what's in Unfinished Tales a whole lot--I think some of it ranks in the best of Tolkien--but bad in that very little of it has anything to do with The Hobbit.

What I hope is going on is that the Necromancer backstory will be largely pared away from the first two films and used to make a separate third film.

If we have to wait yet another year for a third part simply because they'd rather two-hour films than three, I'll be furious.

Why get paid twice when you can get paid thrice?

I could see 2 movies, but not 3.

I was under the impression that Christopher Tolkein had only given Jackson the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but I could be mistaken. Of course, if he was willing to sign over additional rights, there's enough material to make dozens of films, and of course even with just the leftover information in the LOTR appendices, there's probably enough for one. Anyway, I would gladly see three Jackson films set in the LOTRverse.

He never owned the rights to The Lord of the Rings; Tolkien sold them in the late 1950s (I think it was the late 50s anyway. Around then if not) to solve a tax problem.

IIRC, the filmmakers do indeed only have the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (including its appendices).  So they can't take any material from Silmarillion or anything else.

There is material for several full length movies from the leftout chapters of the main body of LOTR. Some of those might even be doable without explicitly contradicting the original Jackson version.

Hurrah, me matey.

http://io9.com/5931001/everything-peter-jackson-added-to-the-hobbit-++-with-proof

Excited if true.

Woah, neither the guy who wrote that nor anybody in his target audience has read The Hobbit, has read The Lord of the Rings, or could imagine an IQ even higer than Peter Jackson's gigantic, overpowering, 70.

It does seem like a bit much, if you ask me. I don't particularly like Lord of the Rings, but I do recall enjoying The Hobbit as a kid. I do not remember it being the lengthiest novel.

Oh well. At least he isn't butchering  more classics with crappy remakes like he did with King Kong.

It is not.

But then, movie versions of novels rarely excite people familiar with the book even without stooping to Jacksonite levels.
Just compare Trainspotting the movie to Trainspotting the novel... so glad I knew the movie first.