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Yes, Peter Jackson Is Actually Thinking About Making the Hobbit Into a Trilogy

Yes, Peter Jackson Is Actually Thinking About Making the Hobbit Into a Trilogy

By July 25, 2012 Miscellaneous, Movies 0 Comment

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You probably saw all the rumors coming out of Comic Con that Peter Jackson was thinking of extending the two Hobbit movies — An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again — into a trilogy. I didn’t not report this because I’m lazy/a terrible/suck, but because it looked to me that the nerdernet was misreading some very innocent quotes by Jackson about having a lot of extra movie footage into something insane. I mean, the LotR movies had a ton of extra footage, and those became the extended editions; I didn’t know why this wouldn’t end up being same.

I still think those original quotes were blown way out of proportion, but it appears the rumors are true — the Hollywood Reporter says that Jackson is meeting with the producers and WB to see if they can get the money worked out. This would mean they’d have to shoot more principle photography (which, as you might recall, just wrapped up). More importantly, if you’re wondering where the hell Jackson would get the source material to eke a third movie out of The Hobbit, the answer is in Tolkien’s ridiculous mountains of Middle-Earth notes and appendices, which actually do detail a few things that went on during The Hobbit that weren’t described in The Hobbit.
But the bigger question is this: Should Jackson turn The Hobbit into a trilogy? We were all kind of freaked out when we heard he was turning The Hobbit into two movies; three movies, even using Tolkien’s actual notes, sounds insane. I don’t doubt that Jackson would turn them into solid movies — indeed, I think the changes he made to LotR to make the series more palatable to mass audiences were pretty uniformly brilliant — but this isn’t just altering things, it’s adding them, and a lot of them. Even with Tolkien-created material as a fill-in, at a certain point I feel like The Hobbit movie would stop recognizably being The Hobbit. 
PJ and the money men haven’t decided anything yet, but THR says they’ll need to decide very soon if they want to do it at all, so expect an announcement in the next few weeks. Because I’m pretty sure this is happening. Last time Peter Jackson made a Tolkien trilogy, he made everyone a bajillion dollars. If he wants to make another Tolkien trilogy, I’m pretty sure people are going to let him. (Via /Film)

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About The Author

Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.