Peter Jackson Announces Third Hobbit Movie 303
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?"
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Plenty of authentic material left.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. The story of Turin would make a damned good movie, though some might not like the ending quite so much. The Fall of Gondolin is pretty good too.
Harry Potter director? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here we go! (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to see the Silmarillion but in Series format (like Game of Thrones or similar). It is long enough for at lest 4 or 5 seasons of 8-10 episodes each. I would really look forward to watch that!
Re:Here we go! (Score:5, Interesting)
i'm not sure i agree that there is that much more of the Tolkien universe to get through. in that, there is depth, but we are about out of breadth.
Re:Here we go! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Just wait... (Score:5, Interesting)
Except HoME is largely made up of the various versions of The Silmarillion that Tolkien worked on from 1917 until the 1960s, except for a few volumes that are works associated with the writing of LotR and associated materials.
Years ago when I was posting on Tolkien newsgroups, when the LotR movies first came out, there was sizable debate about this. I think it would be all but impossible to film the entire Silmarillion, it's too big for a movie. Some parts of it, like the Ainulindale, would be rather hard to bring to the screen.
Some of the stories would work very well, in particular the Turin saga, Beren and Luthien, the Fall of Gondolin (the first story of Middle Earth Tolkien ever wrote) and some of the other works. The expanded Narn I Hin Hurin, which is about Hurin and Turin, would make a pretty awesome epic in its own right.
If you go past the Silmarillion proper, I think the Atalante (Fall of Numenor) would make a very impressive prequel to LotR.
Re:a bit silly (Score:4, Interesting)
Dol Guldur is barely hinted at in the book in just a couple of lines I think. Given the shortness of the book in terms of actual time that passes, the council to deal with Dol Guldur would have taken place after Bilbo was safely back home, the most Gandalf could have done in the short time he was away from the party would be to investigate the necromancer and discover who he might be.
Yes, but if you were to expand the point of view of the Hobbit a little bit, and include a little more material such as Gandalf going to Dol Guldur etc. then you leave yourself well setup for a third film with Bilbo at home and the council waging war on the necromancer. Of course that's not to say that's what they've done, but for now I'm willing to give them the benfit of the doubt and wait and see what they've actually done. As it stands The Hobbit is a very narrow story that leads into LoTR but doesn't really sit well with it; by having a LoTR prequel that expands upon the Hobbit with further material from the Appendices of LoTR I could imagine a much better lead in to the LoTR trilogy being made. Let's hope that's what they're aiming for.
Re:Plenty of authentic material left.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here we go! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Silmarillion was designed by Tolkien to mimic the Bible, as a collection of prose, verse, homilies, letters, etc.
However, as a jumping off point for a whack of mini-series/TV series/made-for-streaming/etc. it's great material -- after all, it's what JRR used to build up his universe on which to build LoTR (I believe the Hobbit was already done by that point).
Re:Here we go! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, perhaps. I see it as different parts of the same struggle.
In one of the appendices, (I don't have my copy in front of me, so this is from memory), Tolkien outlines what part the dwarves of The Lonely Mountain played in the War of the Ring, and how this occupied much of Sauron's forces, an added distraction away from the effort to destroy the ring. There was also something about the last existing Ring of the dwarves playing a part, I think indirectly leading to Gandalf's chance meeting with Thorin, which kicked off the events of The Hobbit. It was all tightly interconnected.
Tolkien would be dancing in his grave (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Money grab (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously you're right that it would have been a plot hole for the movie audience, since you demonstrated exactly how Bombadil would have been understood by that audience.
Those of us who would have liked to see Bombadil have a different understanding of him. He's there for a three reasons.
One, and I think most importantly, he's there as a semi-disposable character to bail the hobbits out when they get into trouble. This is their rite of passage. The world is a dangerous place, the hobbits are fleeing from danger into danger, and they need help, and in the absence of Gandalf, Bombadil is the first helper after they've left the Shire. He's foreshadowing Aragorn's help, and later the Nine Walkers. Your complaint is that he's overpowered to do that job, and that may be, but that's not all he's good for, and I don't think he's quite the disturbing McGuffin you think he is. More on that later.
Second, he's there for a sense of age and history. If you've read the Silmarillion, you have that sense of history, but most people haven't and don't. Bombadil is the first of several things sprinkled through LoTR to give that sense, and he's the only one still present in the world. He's there to give a sense that even though the elves are ancient compared to men, there is something in the world yet more ancient. He's there to lend a glimpse of eternity, to hint that this too shall pass.
Third, he's there for a sense of the alien, the different. He's there to provide the perspective that, while the conflict over the Ring feels epic to everyone involved, there are those who are not involved, who are so different that they don't even understand the fuss. The discussion about Bombadil at the council especially made it clear that, while Bombadil is humanoid, he is in no way human. The Council worries out loud that if given custody of the Ring, he'd lose it through sheer carelessness.
This is where your concerns about the plot hole are a little out of place. Bombadil is alien in the same way that Caradras is alien, and can be considered the benevolent foil to the malevolence of Caradras. He and Caradras both possess tremendous power, but it is a non-mobile elemental sort of power, enormous in terms of sheer strength (Gandalf doesn't even consider challenging Caradras when it resists the Fellowship), but indifferent to the Ring itself, and it is a power that does not move around in the world or participate in it. Each helps or hinders the progress of the Ring when the Ring comes near for reasons of their own that are more about their fundamental natures than anything to do with the Ring.
This is also one of the additional points about the movie that irritate the crap out of aficionados. Not only did Peter Jackson think that movie audiences couldn't understand Bombadil (apparently correctly), he also decided they couldn't understand Caradras, so he introduced the lame sequence where the trouble in the mountains was brought on by Saruman. The cure is worse than the disease. Not only did Saruman not know for sure what the Fellowship was up to, he was vague about where they were and what their numbers were. That's how the whole mistaken identity bit with Pippin and Merry happens.
More to the point, Saruman isn't powerful enough to cause that sort of trouble for a party escorted by Gandalf. In the books, Gandalf and Saruman always carefully step around each other once Saruman fails to convert Gandalf to his cause, and Gandalf isn't involved in either Saruman's downfall or his death. Following directly on from that point, Saruman simply isn't that powerful period. Everything about the Tolkien mythos is about the the decline and fall of basically everything. Everything is downhill, and Saruman (and indeed, Gandalf), are both very much at the low end of that long decline. Bombadil and Caradras are both ancient and therefore at the high end of the power curve. Gandalf and Saruman are both much younger, therefore much less powerful.
So the loss of Bombadil is, I think, directly related to the loss of Caradras, and both losses are unfortunate for many reasons.
Re:Money grab (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you misunderstood what Bombadil represented. Remember the theme of LotR is about resisting the industrial revolution and keeping a more natural, agrarian lifestyle. Bombadil represents the force of Nature. Nature is impartial and cares neither way whether young species like humans kill themselves off. The world will continue with or without them. There's no reason to get involved in petty squabbles lasting a few hundred years when there are millenia of plant and stone to tend and watch.
He was more contradictory that he bothered to save the hobbits from the barrow wights. Yet that, too, was his nature - to be contradictory and do things on a whim.
I do agree general audiences would not have understood, and sadly, Jackson is catering all of these movies to the non-reading masses.