Is there more?
When I heard that Peter Jackson was making “The Hobbit” into two movies, I thought, wow, that’s a stretch. “The Hobbit” isn’t a very long book, after all. But now with the prospect of the mega bucks earning franchise ending, Warner Brothers and Jackson are talking about making a third movie.
Jackson seems like he’s into it–at Comic-Con he talked about how he wished he had shot more footage. Remember way back when Peter Jackson didn’t want to direct the Hobbit movies? Somewhere Guillermo del Toro is rolling his eyes.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Sources close to the production of The Hobbit say the filmmaker has concluded that he wants to turn his upcoming two-film adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien epic into a trilogy. That would require additional shooting that sources say could take place next summer for about two months in New Zealand.”
Of course there’s a lot that would need to happen to get this together–they’d have to reassemble the cast, pay them, and worst of all, deal with rights issues for “The Hobbit” or other Tolkien books that might be used to fill out a script; speculation is that Jackson would use material from the “Lord of the Rings” appendices.
THR reports, “If we’re going to do it, we have to make a decision soon,” says a source close to the production. “It’s strongly driven by the filmmakers’ desire to tell more of the story.”
I’m not sure if this is a good thing…on one hand, I’m glad that Peter Jackson feels good enough about the two Hobbit movies that he’s up for a third. On the other, I wonder if this could be overkill and if we’ll just end up with a pale shadow of a Tolkien story.
