To be continued in Thread 2…
I can’t speak for Twilight since I have never seen them, but I don’t think any of those movies have the “To be Continued” unfinished ending. They’re all still movies with a beginning, middle & end, they just also make up parts of a larger whole. The Batman films & Hunger Games series are ever less “unfinished” since you can watch any one of those on their own.
I don’t know about the Hobbit. Sure, they are definitely stretching it…BUT there is a ton of stuff that happens in the book. Honestly, I’d rather watch three movies and be really, really entertained, than watch 1 or 2 movies and feel like I missed a bunch of stuff or that the plot was rushed.
Somebody - it might have been Lynch - was on a radio talk show in San Francisco about a year before Dune premiered (it had just finished primary filming and started post-production/effects), and made a comment that a significant amount of the book would be left out because “nobody wants to watch a 15-hour movie.”
I do. Well, not Dune, but something I was really interested in. I love movies, but often regret the “format limitations.”
The Lord of the Rings was too short.
Nothing can beat Clue. You had to watch 3 whole movies to get 10 extra minutes of material.
Totally worth it too.
Heh, DVD is so much better - I have it with all three endings.
LOTR was 3 books (or six), so 3 movies made sense. I could see Hobbit being two movies (esp with some of the appendices), 3 is stretching it. I Imagine this scene:
Bilbo: How did you get your name? (Oakenshield)
Book Thorin: One paragraph
Movie Thorin: cut to 15 minute battle scene
Brian
(who actually wouldn’t mind see that)
Looking at the relative sizes of the print versions, I think I have to agree there’s got to be some padding going on to get three movies out of “The Hobbit”, since LotR went three movies at at least 3x the thickness in print form.
They are adding other stuff in that was implied, like when Gandalf fights “the Necromancer” (Sauron) after the Hobbit is concluded. They aren’t going to make three movies out of “little person joins 15 different little people, finds a fancy piece of costume jewelry, helps kill a dragon, and hides while a war goes on.”
I have no problem with splitting big stories into parts but each split should then in turn be a full story. You can have unresolved plot lines and threads and open questions but the movie itself tells a full story.
To take an example that is probably one of the best of medium: The Empire Strikes Back basically tells the story of the attack on Hoth and how our characters escape and eventually find safety. Lots of continuing plots and threads but it tells a story of its own.
You left out the spiders. There were lots of spiders, which can result in spooky slow pans. Then if they leave in the songs and poetry, that’s three films right there.
Also, before spiders, they meet the Elves. Cue obligatory shot of Orlando Bloom, eyes fluttering, even though he wasn’t mentioned in the novel.
Maybe they could put the Tom Bombadil sections as a coda just to shut the Internet of 2001 up.
LOTR is a tough gauge for book length to film length conversion. If memory serves, in the book The Two Towers, the battle at Helm’s Deep is described briefly through character exposition. Whereas in the film, it makes sense for Helm’s Deep to be a cinematic centerpiece, and dominate a big chunk of the screen time.