Well, they had to fit in that famous scene where Bilbo falls off a cliff and is presumed dead until he shows up again after 20 minutes of flashbacks.
(I kid, I kid… Love ya, PJ).
Maybe they’ll make 3 2-hour films, not 3 3-hour films? That might be tolerable. 9 hours total would be insane.
Nice to see the Tolkien estate ripping an idea off Robert Jordan for once.
This is bullshit. The Hobbit doesn’t really warrant two movies, let alone three. Don’t take this as a slur on the book, the book it great, but it’s just not 3 movies worth of material. For fucks sake, it’s shorter (and less dense) than any of the three LOTR volumes that only took a single movie each.
The Rankin Bass version might not have been perfect, but it wasn’t bad at all, and they somehow managed to fit all the really important bits into 77mins. Doubling that should’ve been plenty to fit in all the stuff that they skipped and some overly long panoramic views and slow motion scenes to boot, yet still fit into a single movie.
I don’t understand what the fuck these people are doing to make it stretch out so long that it takes 3 movies. Clearly they’re just after 3x the box office and 3x the DVD/Bluray sales, but I still think they need to go fuck themselves with a cactus for doing this.
Oh, dang it. I left my keys in Esgaroth!
I agree with this - and that makes me worry. This will require a great deal of additions, and some of the parts talked about didn’t exist as anything more than notes or little bits mentioned by a character. gandalf never realy explained what happened at Dol Goldur, for example. And that implies that Jackson will basically make a bunch of it up.
The problem? He sucks as it. Think of all the crap he inserted into LotR. Most of it ended up being cheesy and obnoxious. Aragorn falling off a cliff. Legolas surfing. Great green army O’ the dead. Very long and tedious sequence with the army of the dead… none of which made sense. It does not inspire confidence.
Here’s the thing - I think it works as three movies because much of the audience will not have enough familiarity with the works of tolkien to go see “Necromancer 2, Sauron Returns”, but they will go see all 3 parts of ‘The Hobbit’ - so, easier to sell one story cut in thirds than 3 different parts.
In any event - I will be there for all three parts, Armageddon notwithsstanding.
I have to trust PJ on this one. His treatment of LOTR was quite good–not only in my opinion, they all 3 did well in the box office.
The Hobbit could be treated as written, in which case it could probably be done in 1 big film, maybe 2 small ones. But PJ & crew are right: this is the last real chance to capture the rest of the Middle Earth backstory. Leave that all out and you get, “Yippee, Bilbo went there and back again.” Oh, and by the way, he managed to pick up the Most Evil Thing In The World and it was really of no consequence so don’t ya fret too much about that mm’kay. But what of The Silmarillion as history? LOTR never really tells you who and what Sauron is, or who Morgoth was, or why the elves so loathed/feared them, or what was the big deal with Galadriel’s apparent relief with her ability to just say no to the ring…? Give yourself 3 films and you can make, essentially, the entire backstory to LOTR using Bilbo’s journey as a framework. I have to wonder if Tolkien wouldn’t have done it that way if he’d even known about LOTR when he was writing The Hobbit. I think PJ has something in mind quite a bit different from just telling The Hobbit.
It strikes me that this is very late in the process of making the original two movies to be doing this. The first movie is out in less than 5 months. To expand it to three must mean some changes to the first, and a bit more than pick-ups to expand the second film, surely?
You are a very bad person. But extremely amusing, nonetheless.
This is my worry also - I think to do it best, they would need to adjust the first film as well, instead of just the second. I don’t know if they can do that in five months, especially because PJ is supposed to be working on Tintin right about now.
As much as it hurts me to say it, I would almost be ok with them delaying the first Hobbit so that they had enough time to do the cuts and changes properly so that the third film doesn’t feel all bloaty and tacked-on. I’m really worried that’s what’s going to happen, though.
That said - still super excited to see the Appendices material and maybe parts of the Sil get the film treatment. This means that Aragorn will likely be back also.
There is no way in hell people will put up with 3 movies worth of exposition just to flesh out the 1st and 2nd Ages so we can hear the story of a homebody hobbit that gets whisked of on an adventures and wishes, not the for last time, that he was back home in his comfortable hole.
Tell the story of Bilbo and then go get a contract with HBO to make the Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabêth and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.
[At the risk of being whooshed] The Tolkien estate has nothing to do with these films. And (alas) the Silmarillion’s rights are owned by them, and no they have no interest in selling them. BTW they’ll expire 70 years after Christopher Tolkien’s death, so we can probably see the Sil movies sometime in the 2090’s…
The Hobbit Part 3: Tom Bombadil’s greatest hits!
Only time will tell, my friend. But the geeks are out there, and they are many. Rankin Bass is available to those who want the children’s story, PJ is doing the epic version. I plan on giving it a chance. If it flops, well, how many times has Batman been done? Maybe Quentin Tarantino can do better.
There’s a bunch that happens after the battle that ought to be included. Even without getting into off-page events, I can think of two indispensable scenes. Then you’d need a “back again” travel sequence between them.
But the LotR was rather viciously cut down to do that. (I mean, I like it too, but it leaves a lot out.)
A real full treatment of The Hobbit, plus some backstory and parallel and linking events… I guess I can see it.
The tragedy is just that PJ didn’t make a basic The Hobbit first, and then get to do a full treatment of The Lord of the Rings based on that success, rather than the other way round.
I’m grateful that our favorite first-run movie theater in Bangkok still charges only 100 baht (US$3.17) for tickets. That’ll cut the expense.
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This isn’t what I would have done, but I have confidence in PJ and his team. If anyone can make this work, they can.
I totally agree with Inigo Montoya’s assessment. Ignore the fact that it’s The Hobbit with extra stuff tacked on to pad it out, as so many have referred to it. Think of it as all that was missed out in the prologue. We were dropped in the middle of an epic history to tell the stories of LOTR, now let’s drop in to the same epic history, just a bit earlier.
Ohplease, ohplease, ohplease… I’d be happy if it was 10 parts. The more PJ hobitteses the better.