Someone please explain to me how The Hobbit justifies three movies. Bonus points and a free subscription to the blog for anyone who can do it without mentioning Harry Potter, Twilight or box office billions.
Open thread.
by Tim F| 240 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Someone please explain to me how The Hobbit justifies three movies. Bonus points and a free subscription to the blog for anyone who can do it without mentioning Harry Potter, Twilight or box office billions.
Open thread.
Comments are closed.
bingbango
Because…Harry Potter, Twilight, box office billions.
Alex S.
The explananation? About $1 billion for each movie at the global box office.
dr. bloor
$
4tehlulz
Artistic integrity or something.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, it’s also know as “To There And Back.”
So, you’ve got a “to there” part.
A “there” part (featuring a large dragon!)
And, finally, a “back” part.
So, three movies!
Cassidy
Because Peter Jackson made a a very well done trilogy out of the LOTR that made people a lot of money.
In all seriousness, Jackson got it right the first time, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt.
Dusty
The television version of PRIDE & PREJUDICE ran almost six hours. Is THE HOBBIT less complicated than P&P? I honestly don’t know.
NCSteve
If it means he can cut each of them down to a size that lets me sit all the through them after the medium soft drink that washed down my popcorn fills my bladder, I’m good with that. If he’s making three more three or four hour movies, however, then he owes me another ten hours of LOTR.
Legalize
Moar Hobbitses!
Rheinhard
“The Hobbit” doesn’t.
“The Hobbit” + “The Silmarillion” does.
dead existentialist
There is the strangest television going on over at the women’s epee finals (?) The Koreans have lodged a protest (and have to fork over some cash in order for it to happen, apparently), and the Korean fencer is sitting on the stage by her lonesome. Very strange tv.
jeffreyw
Because Kitteh! that’s why.
Brachiator
Hobbitses fans wants to spend lots of time with their precious, Hobbitses movies.
Aden Nak
Because your money is delicious, and they would like to consume its deliciousness.
Other than that? I’ve heard that they’re putting in a lot other material of Tolkien’s that happens contemporaneously concerning the Ring, but wouldn’t merit its own movie.
Mostly though, it’s your delicious money.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cassidy:
Yeah, but each of the LOTR movies covered ONE book of a trilogy. In the process, a lot was cut out, too.
The Hobbit is ONE book. Not three.
eric
@Rheinhard: is there any indication, that such is the case?
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
Also, New Line Cinema wants to spend more time with the money of Hobbitses fans.
Geoduck
@eric: It sounds like they aren’t using The Silmarillion, (which they don’t have the rights to) but lots of supplemental stuff that Tolkien wrote which never formally got incorporated into a book; there’s all sorts of stuff crammed into the Appendixes at the end of The Return of the King.
DonBoy
They’re going to make all the characters into Ents, who talk verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwwwwly.
Di
In addition to those things you listed that shall not be mentioned, there’s the fact that New Zealand has a lot of really beautiful countryside.
Also, the novel Brideshead Revisited was made into an 11-part series by the British, producing one of the best works ever shown on TV, imho.
CraigoMc
This guy could release a 5 hr extended edition based on one of Tolkien’s used tissues.
Mike E
@Villago Delenda Est: And wasn’t that third installment so woefully encumbered by the previous films (certainly by the 2nd) that it nearly imploded from the weight? Didn’t Jack Nicholson famously corner Elijah Wood on the street and say to him, “WTF was with all those endings? I took young children to that beeyotch!”
Funny quote from linked article: “Since when have diehard fans of a giant fantasy universe ever been disappointed by a bloated prequel trilogy?” Yeah. Me-sah kill somebody!
Nina
Loooooong looooong helicopter shots of New Zealand masquerading as the Misty Mountains.
SatanicPanic
I don’t see the problem. Maybe he really does think he has enough material. Except for a few things in the LOTR movies (the green scrubber ghosts, Legolas riding a shield like a skateboard) his judgement has been pretty good. Leave him alooooooone.
Adam
The middle movie will focus solely on the riddle game.
Box without hinges, key or a lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.
Tom Q
The warning signs were all there: The last hour of Return of the King seemed to go on interminably. King Kong was so over-long I lost my place in the plot half the time. Peter Jackson is suffering from a form of Cimino-ism — getting out there in the field and so caught up in his ecstatic artistic vision that he lets go his grip on the reality of the project. Meanwhile, the studio is happy to charge additional admissions from fans so devoted they’ll turn up no matter what you serve them.
I really do think Jackson is talented. Loved Heavenly Creatures, and the first two Rings movies. But at this point he’s succummbed to movie elephantiasis.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
Bryan Caplan gets my nomination for Worst Person award.
What an asshole. h/t Erik Loomis @ LGM.
Warning: Trying to post over there gets you modded. They have a pitbull named Lauren over there who screens everything, and knocks anything with a hard truth in it into the bitbucket for claims of incivility. So don’t bring up obvious counterexamples to Caplan’s fantasy. Like Jamie Dimon or Alan Greenspan.
And for the love of god, don’t claim he’s rehashing old and debunked gilded age arguments and passing them off as original ideas. The fainting couch over there already has a line around the block.
brendan sexton
Hey, when is that Goodnight Moon thing coming out?
brendan sexton
Hey, when is that Goodnight Moon thing coming out?
Cassidy
@Villago Delenda Est: You’re right. But again, I’m willing to trust PJ’s guidance. From what I understaand, principal photography on both films is almost done. PJ has enough film for the releases and his director’s cut. So, making that extra material into a middle film really isn’t that huge an undertaking.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Nothing is more precious to Hollywood than box office profitses.
OT, but related, is the old story of how hit movies never, never, never, EVER earn a dime, and Hollywood can teach Mitt Romney how to hide money, as Kevin Costner is finding out.
I always found it amazing that Universal loved James Garner, wanted to continue to work with him in the future, and still tried to cheat him out of Rockford Files profits.
Yutsano
Because shut up that’s why!!
(Thread needs moar Maxpuppeh.)
pragmatism
gotta tee up the 8 part Silmarillion.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
I’ve heard the second movie will be mostly backstory about Smaug’s years at Harrow School.
mechwarrior online
It’s easy to explain why you could do three movies.
The actual story during The Hobbit is longer than a single one of the LOTR books, so it being longer than a standard movie makes sense. However a TON of stuff happens in The Hobbit behind the scenes, a lot of it involving Gandalf and the White Council and their actions against the Necromancer and the growing dark powers.
The thing is, the book never really goes into it, you don’t fully know what’s going on. It mentions it briefly in that a whole ton of stuff that’s vastly more important than Bilbo and the Dwarves goofing around are, but you don’t see the details. Merely that the White Council was extremely worried about the dark powers growing and the Necromancer was stirring up crap.
In LOTR a lot of the back story is filled in. We know who’s on the White Council, we know the Necromancer is Sauron, we know he was driven out blah blah blah… but none of that was really answered in The Hobbit.
If they wanted to actually show what you learn later, it’s easily three movies.
Butch
Because they can, and then afterward they can syndicate it so that when you’re not watching endless replays of old episodes of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, and LOTR, you can alternate these choices with the Hobbit trilogy.
Seriously, there were a few things left out of LOTR that puzzled me (the complete absence of Tom Bombadil is one), so maybe they’ll somehow be worked in.
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
From the Note On The Text in my single-volume paperback edition:
Similarly, Peter Jackson & co. shot most of the movie version over a single 18-month stretch, so one could argue that that too is not a trilogy, but rather a single 11-hour film released in three parts.
jl
You throw in the complete course in Ye Olde Lost Hobbit Language of the Elders, and foot hair grooming instructions, it seems like a bargain to me.
ET
Nerdy obsession of Peter Jackson.
Violet
@brendan sexton: Yeah, I can’t wait to see Goodnight Moon. I think the “goodnight nobody, goodnight mush” segment will be particularly poignant.
Sly
From what I’ve read, he wants to use a lot of stuff in the appendices of both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series. Radagast, for instance, is only mentioned one or two times in the book, but Jackson is basically creating a role for him in the movies (probably because Radagast was in LOTR and Jackson cut him out… along with lots of other stuff). There was also talk of a kind of “bridge” movie between the Hobbit and Fellowship, and that the battle at the end of the Hobbit is still the end of the second movie.
Balloon-Juice Platinum Member
I predict there is an extra tax break for a third movie.
Richard Fox
Jackson completely screwed up the ending in Part 3 of the original LOTR movie-thon (in my opinion) –No battle for Hobbiton, no Wormtongue reappearance (as in the book) nothing to feel good about. Except getting rid of Frodo in Elysian Fields or whatever.
Maybe he needs 3 NEW movies to undo all the damage. Make things neater and such.
And yes, the nice $$ will work out fine for him. Too.
HelpThe99ers
The epic conclusion to The Hobbit Trilogy would be, of course, Tom Bombadil vs. Agent Smith.
(/removes tongue from cheek)
MikeJ
I had sort of hoped the Hobbit would be better than LoTR, what with it being shorter and more self contained. I think I got though about an hour of the first LoTR movie, and it had enough source material to justify the length. I can’t imagine even attempting to sit through this.
Primigenius
Well there’s a whole lot of backstory happening while Bilbo and the dozen dwarves are on Thorin’s quest to reclaim the dwarven dough of old. The White Council was confronting the Witch King of Angmar in Dol Guldur and chased him back momentarily into Mordor. It would be interesting to see cuts back and forth between Bilbo’s outing and the White Council’s police action. And of course the Council’s victory, while not Pyrrhic, was in no way complete, as events would show. If Jackson can make five good movies out of it, I’m all for it. Better than yet another reboot of a comic-book hero who was rebooted less than a dozen years ago. And no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to make them watch The Hobbit are they?
gnomedad
Episode I: The Phantom Burglar
Brachiator
A true Hobbit fan: “Only three?”
ETA: If Jackson really had cojones, he would do Spenser’s “Fairie Queen” cycle. Twleve movies easy, at least.
jl
@mechwarrior online:
” The actual story during The Hobbit is longer than a single one of the LOTR books, so it being longer than a standard movie makes sense. However a TON of stuff happens in The Hobbit behind the scenes, a lot of it involving Gandalf and the White Council and their actions against the Necromancer and the growing dark powers. ”
Is Jackson going to go all Lucas prequel on us? We going to get several hours of back story on Hobbit international trade negotiations and tariff disputes?
I can’t wait!
CraigoMc
@Butch: You were puzzled by the absence of a fruity, enigmatic rhymester who is almost totally disconnected from the plot and who may or may not be God?
Leaving aside the WTF factor – do you honestly believe that these movies need to be even longer?
MomSense
Moar middle earth!
mechwarrior online
@Sly:
In LOTR everything happens “on camera” while reading the books. Which is to say you’re shown all of it, it switches between the groups as they are all moving to the end of the story. You’re fully aware of everything that’s going on.
In The Hobbit the majority of it, as related to LOTR, happens “off camera”. IE Gandalf says something about the Necromancer and the White Council and wanders off to do something about it…. and that’s it. He shows up later and pops off a line or two about a dark power gathering, him running the Necromancer out of the forest, and some issues on the council, but you never know what happens.
A bit of this is explained through LOTR, not fully though, but enough that you can piece back together just what the hell was happening.
LOTR leaves none of the story hidden from you, The Hobbit leaves out the vast majority of what actually happened.
Seanly
I can easily see 2 90+ minute features, but 3 movies sounds too much like Comic Guy pr0n.
Regarding LotR, didn’t he want to do it in 4 or 5 movies?
I’m looking forward to Hollywood discovering Gene Wolfe & making movies out of any of his series. Splitting the Torturer Tetralogy into about 7 films…
Tehanu
@Geoduck:
As I keep saying practically everywhere, there’s 60 years’ worth of history between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. It’s got nothing to do with The Silmarillion which all happened thousands of years before. I have lots of quibbles with Peter Jackson’s version of LOTR (as well as some fairly serious criticisms), but as several people have pointed out, if you really want to bring a book to life you need to give it more screen time rather than less.
jl
What studio makes the Hobbit and LOTR movies? Maybe a cross over. Hobbits meet Capt. Jack Sparrow? Vampire Hobbits in Beverly Hills? Something like that, would be cool. That would be nice
I can’t wait!
Hobbits meet A and C meet Fstein, how about that? I will work on a pitch and make me some money.
Soonergrunt
@CraigoMc: And it would be Fucking EPIC!
@Seanly: “3 movies sounds too much like Comic Guy pr0n.” And what, pray, would be wrong with that? Hmmmm?
FlipYrWhig
@Geoduck:
Tricksy Hobbitses loves the Appendixes.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s Jackson’s Citizen Hobbit!
jibeaux
I admit that I never could get very far into the Hobbit (it’s that ovary disadvantage, maybe), but I’m loving Game of Thrones. Which reminds me of Tolkien with more sexytime. Yes, I say that not having read Tolkien, but being the sort of person who wants to have read Tolkien.
Zifnab
@Dusty: This. They’re charging you $10 an episode to make a mini-series.
The BBC cranked out three episodes of Sherlock a year, with each episode being 90 minutes long. That’s roughly movie length. I bought the DVDs. :-p
Honestly, I can’t even get mad. So often we see people flipping out over book-to-movie conversions where the just hack the shit out of the novel to fit it into a screenplay. Now they’re not doing that anymore because the finances can justify the expense. Consider this progress.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@jl:
I look forward to Jar-Jar Proudfoot.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
Well, one can argue that there’s three times the material in the published Lord of the Rings (in three volumes of six books, or whatever) than is in The Hobbit, which, I have been told, is sort of a children’s story of that world, as opposed to the heavy adult content of LOTR.
Yes, there is all that other important prequel stuff going on at the same time as all the Bilbo and the Dwarves traveling road show and dragon baiting expedition, Bilbo being along for his burglary skills, which Dwarves apparently don’t have.
So, if you’re telling a more complete story of the lead up to LOTR, you’ve got more material than is presented in The Hobbit to put up there.
I still think that milking the audience’s wallets is a motivation. Jackson’s King Kong was ludicrous in tossing padding in that seemed to be put in “because it’s so cool!”, particularly that scene with all the dinosaurs falling all over themselves.
MobiusKlein
Bloated battle sequences.
In the LOtR movies, a battle sequence that takes 2 pages of text takes 45 minutes of screen time.
It’s a bad Champions session, even slower than DnD 3.5.
“I delay”
Sloegin
In the 3rd Hobbit movie, Bilbo breaks into a 90 minute monologue extolling the virtues of the productive elite and lambastes the moochers and parasites of society (men, elves, and more than a couple nasty hobbitses). He then retires to Bag-End Gulch and spends his days chasing the kids off his lawn.
Or maybe that’s the plot of the 3rd Atlas Shrugged movie. I forget.
MattR
@Seanly:
When is the last time a studio designed a 2 part movie? The only one that pops into my head is Kill Bill. I don’t count the last Harry Potter since they were already part of a larger sequence of movies.
jayjaybear
It’s my understanding that the third film will be a linking film between Hobbit and LOTR, filling in the 80-odd years between the two. There’s really probably enough in the Appendices of LOTR to flesh that out into a decent film.
Heliopause
Hell, someone explain how Lord of the Rings justified three movies. Two-thirds of one of them was, “oh Sam,” “oh Frodo,” “oh Sam, ” “oh Frodo, “oh Sam…” Forty-five minutes of another one was Boromir dying one of those endless Shakespearean deaths, and then you spend the next two and a half movies not remembering or caring who Boromir was. And of course they spent time on the one or two token female characters but didn’t bother trying to make them interesting. I’m thinking you could easily have fit that trilogy into two movies, one if you give the editor a couple of greenies.
Jay in Oregon
@Brachiator:
Peter Jackson and the LOTR actors went so far as to (independantly) sue New Line in order to get an audit of the books. IIRC, this why is why it took so long for The Hobbit to get made, and why PJ wasn’t attached to the movie for part of that interval; they wanted him to drop his request for an audit.
Semi-related: J. Michael Stracynski, creator of Babylon 5, will tell the story of how he signed a horrible contract with Warner Brothers in order to get B5 made. As he puts it, a fire can wipe out a movie set in 2011 and WB can charge it against B5‘s profits.
As you say, I’d bet that Bain Capital and its ilk are rank amateurs compared to the movie studios’ ability to
spendhide money.redshirt
It will be a good day for a White Council.
SatanicPanic
@CraigoMc: Second on the omission of Tom Bombadil. That character annoys me- he’s a transparent dig at hippies (or whatever people called them back in JRR’s day) and serves no purpose besides giving them some swords that they could have picked up anywhere. Glad they left that fool out.
ericblair
@Violet:
I’m waiting for the unrated director’s cut. And then the dark, edgy reboot.
mechwarrior online
@jl:
Not at all. The majority of the action in The Hobbit is Gandalf VS the Necromancer and the White Council VS the Witch King…. but you’re never shown about it or told about it. They tell you in The Lord of The Rings what happened though. The Hobbit just handles it like this
Gandalf: “I have to go do something”
Vanishes for a huge part of the book while people sing songs and act stupid.
Gandalf: “I’m back, sorry had a problem with a Necromancer, and the White Council went to war, something about a dark power, now let’s forget about all of that and sing songs”
Book ends….
LOTR pieces together what actually happened, but The Hobbit just handwaves it away like it doesn’t matter. Then LOTR Gandalf points out “oh yeah that Necromancer was Sauron, and the White Council went to war with the Witch King, by the way there is a giant evil army and we are all fucked because nobody paid attention for the past couple years instead of helping us fight the Necromancer”.
It’s almost comedic.
Amir Khalid
@pragmatism:
The Silmarillion covers a creation myth and then (if I’m not mistaken) some 30,000 years of Middle Earth’s history, in which LOTR is summarized in just two paragraphs on the last page. I doubt that eight four-hour movies could even begin to do it justice — by Sir Peter’s standards, anyway.
roc
George Lucas Disease.
Wherein one enjoys so much success they begin to believe the hype. They forget how much constructive criticism and contribution from others tempered old ideas into those great works. They then ignore all criticism of the new work, believing they know better. And with the old team either silenced or replaced with yes-men, the result is (almost always) an unadulterated expression of over-indulgent crap.
See also: Avatar, The Matrix Sequels, etc.
You can actually see hints of this in action whenever Jackson talks about his pet 48fps edit. He not only doesn’t understand why audiences don’t like it, he fully admits that he plans on simply ignoring the near-universal feedback.
So he’s almost certainly not splitting the movie just to make more billions. He’s doing it because He Knows Best. Though the studio is certainly only going along with it because of the billions.
Mike E
Well, I s’pose it’ll be alright, if’n they are 108 mins each rather than 208 mins per.
Cassidy
@Heliopause: Hey, hey, hey…let’s not be talking smack about Sean Bean.
redshirt
@Amir Khalid: No way to do the entire book. However, sections of it are quite stand alone and could be done. Prime among them the story of Beren and Luthien, which I think would be a huge hit.
Zifnab
@mechwarrior online:
Yeah, but that was kinda the point. The Hobbit was written a) for children and b) from the perspective of Joe Average. Gandalf was the parent, bustling about on important business you little people wouldn’t understand. Meanwhile, Bilbo is the kid scraping by on the skin of his teeth in what he feels is the epic quest of a lifetime. Giving Gandalf center stage would belittle all of that. Its one of the reasons the Galadrial / Gandalf love story is so off-key. You just want to shout at the screen “Get off the screen, you old coot! This movie isn’t about you!”
cathyx
I have a confession to make because I feel really guilty. I clicked on the headline at HuffPo that read Photo: Kim Kardashian’s pants are about to burst.
Butch
@CraigoMc: No, not longer, but I was curious about why things were and were not included; as someone else has pointed out, most of the ending of the third book (the return to Hobbiton) disappears, for example.
As far as the length….the nearest movie theater for me is 30 miles away (true, believe it or not), so I almost never see movies in a theater. I think it took me 6 months to get through the LOTR DVD series, watching a little bit here and there.
elmo
@CraigoMc:
Iarwain ben-Adar we called him, oldest and fatherless…
I haven’t picked up the books in twenty years, but there are some things that stick.
pragmatism
@Amir Khalid: in mccardlesque fashion, i am off by an order of magnitude.
80 part silmarillion it is.
JGabriel
__
__
CraigoMc:
Exactly. Christopher Tolkien has been doing it for decades.
.
quannlace
Was funny on Morning Joe, they way they were going on about Bill Clinton speaking at the Democratic Convention. Was there any doubt that he wouldn’t be there? Meanwhile, I came up with a new cure for insomnia. Forget counting sheep, try to figure who the Repubs are gonna get for their big speakers at their convention. All of the big names have already bailed: Dubya, Bush Sr., Cheney. So who is going to be their big draw?
Palin? She’s just been insulted by Cheney
McCain? The guy who couldn’t win.
The other Primary candidates? Santorum? Sure, lets have a guy who’s defending pedophiles and homophobes. Gingrich? He can talk more about the moon colony and his wife’s kids book. And Bachmann is just insane.
Jindal and Rubin? The token not-whitey guys? Jindal did so well the last time he made a national address.
Really, who ARE they gonna get where viewers will say, “Ooh, I’m tuning in to hear this guy talk!’
Gregory
Feh. If memory serves me right, Rankin-Bass’ excellent animated version of The Hobbit clocks in at about 70 minutes (thanks to the songs carrying a lot of narrative weight), and the only major story element cut is Beorn.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Butch:
Tom Bombadil is a duplicate character of the head Ring Wrath.
http://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
Linda Featheringill
@Di:
Brideshead:
Because I missed the series on PBS, I recently saw it in a Brideshead marathon. The first two-thirds of the story was great! The last third was redemption-and-come-back-to-the-Church crap.
However, ymmv.
mechwarrior online
@Zifnab:
I know that was the point as it was a kids book. But for this thread we are talking about how you could turn The Hobbit into a three part movie. What happens as in written down on the page is probably only a movies worth, but what happens as in what Gandalf was actually up to along with the White Council is easily two more movies. If you keep in mind that two of the more epic showdowns vs the Necromancer (Souron) and the Lich (Witch Kings) were never shown or really explained. It’s not until LOTR that you realize “holy fuck, Gandalf dueled Souron and won” during The Hobbit and wasn’t just off evicting random wizards for castles.
Chris T.
@Nina: But New Zealand is Middle-Earth!
jl
@mechwarrior online: Maybe they should skip the back story and do a Hobbit Bollywood musical. Those are fun. I say, go with the singing and dancing and stupid stuff. Especially if they can work in some cute Hobbit chicks (and if they do not exist as of now, I suggest that would be a highly inventive and original addition to the Lore and will help out with the $).
Or, another long crescendo to a a coupla hours of sword hacking and magic lightshow laser magic force field pushy fights.
Just, no more international trade and finance theory in fantasy action flicks. Unless you can work in some diagrams and Ben Stein going “Brodo… Brodo….Brodo….? .
Edit: Bildo?
Lit3Bolt
Actually, the last movie is just Gandalf and Galadriel doing the reverse cow-elf for 3 hours.
elmo
@mechwarrior online:
SPOILER!!
Villago Delenda Est
@quannlace:
The reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan.
BTW, Palin has NOT been invited to the shindig, supposedly she’s going to hold court somewhere nearby, but is persona non grata at the convention itself.
MikeJ
You want to make a series of movies about the same characters? Talk to François Fucking Truffaut. 400 Blows, Antoine age 12. Stolen Kisses, age 23. Bed and Board, 25. Love on the Run, 34.
That’s the way you make a series of movies.
FIN
SatanicPanic
@Butch:
Starting to sound like Peter Jackson’s publicist, but that was another part I didn’t miss. Sure, the point is that the hobbits have learned to fight for themselves and they put that knowledge to use. But, really, who cares? It would be like if, after getting his medal at the end of the first Star Wars Movie, Luke Skywalker had gone back to Tattoine and kicked some sand people butt.
Just One More Canuck
@jibeaux: “A classic is something everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read” – Mark Twain
Amir Khalid
@redshirt:
Or The Children of Hurin. JRR wrote a novel-length version of this tale. Unfortunately it gets really depressing at the end.
CraigoMc
The scouring of the Shire, in order to be done coherently, would require 30-45 minutes of screen time. This is Peter Jackson we’re talking about, so it would have been 60 minutes long. 60 minutes tacked onto the end of 200 minute film. The story of the Ring is over, and the Shire scenes, while personally important to Tolkien and his fans, is tangential to the plot.
TheF79
@redshirt: I always figured Turin Turambar would be the first place they’d look to do something Silmarillion. Might not be as upbeat as Beren and Luthien though…
Murc
Thinking of it in terms of number of movies isn’t entirely helpful.
Think of it in terms of running time.
A lot happens in the Hobbit; unlike a number of things in LotR, which actually COMPRESS when translated to the big screen, stuff in the Hobbit, if its to be done properly, will expand the narrative. They also want to run a storyline involving the Necromancer and tie that in with a lot of the LotR mythology, which is a perfectly acceptable editorial decision.
So okay, lets figure six hours total runtime. That’s, what? A full 90 minutes, a movie in its own right, for Necromancer stuff. Another half-hour for just the setup stuff at the beginning. The entire trip from the Shire to Erebor is probably two and a half hours in toto; that’s the Trolls, Rivendell, Goblin-town, Gollum, Beorn, Mirkwood, Laketown. Another hour and a half to deal with Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies, and you’re home and dry.
Six hours is three normal-length, two-hour movies. Now, this is part of a tentpole franchise and involves Peter Jackson, so they probably COULD do a pair of three-hour movies. But studios hate doing that, theaters hate doing that, and the money men hate doing that. Once you’ve already made the decision to hack a book apart for length reasons, why not go whole hog?
Money is, of course, a factor. Three gets you more than two. But unless each installment is only 90 minutes long, I’m okay with that. I’m comfortable paying full freight for any movie two hours or longer.
CraigoMc
@JGabriel: And Frank Herbert’s kid. And Michael Shaara’s, who might be the worst hack of them all.
Culture of Truth
The worst part is Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera do live commentary during the hobbits’ journey.
Culture of Truth
It’s 8 hours because of all the live tweets that pop up on the screen
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@SatanicPanic:
a scene Lucas couldn’t resist putting into Attack of the Clones,..
Maude
@Villago Delenda Est:
McCain took after Cheney for the Palin VP choice remark. McCain was not amused.
jon
@MattR: The studio didn’t demand or plan a two-part movie for Kill Bill. What happened is Tarantino ended up with more footage than a single film could do, the studio liked it anyway, and there was trust that a lot more money would be recouped if there were four-plus releases rather than two and maybe a director’s cut that would be too long and scare people off as a result.
With the Hobbit, I’m going to be disappointed that so much of the story I loved as a young reader will be split over too many hours of film. I want a shorter, more direct version. And I also know damn well I’ll enjoy watching the elves get a Dunedain lad to raise and train (and seeing the Rangers of the North wouldn’t suck.) I’ll enjoy seeing Radagast the Brown. I want to see Saruman get a palantir and get corrupted by a drive toward power through his drive for knowledge. I want to see The Necromancer. And then there are the things in the book that aren’t remembered: the mayor of Lake Town’s craven greed, the House of Beorn (watch Andrew Sullivan have his dwarf beardgasm topped by his “Holy Shit! A Bear Man!” reaction,) and the Sackville-Bagginses getting shafted out of a house when their rich dead relative comes back richer and considerably less dead.
Yeah, I’m a nerd. And I’m fucking proud of it! I’ve wanted to see this since I saw Jurassic Park and said “Now they can make the Hobbit and it won’t suck!”
mechwarrior online
@jl:
The could work and would be fun but it would royally confuse people.
@elmo:
I’ll give you another spoiler, Bilbo’s magic ring is the ring of power!
Evelyn
Numenor? The tale of Beren and Luthien? The fall of Thingol?
Honestly, the only way I can justify it is if he goes way way past the Hobbit and tells the story of the whole world. Since Galadriel is in the trailer (and she isn’t in the book), I’m wondering if he’s going to just crack open the whole Lost Tales and the Silmarillion.
Otherwise, it’s all about CREAM.
jon
Also, too: (from the Pedia d’Wiki) “Kill Bill is a two-part 2003–2004 action/thriller film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Kill Bill was originally scheduled for a single theatrical release, but with a running time of over four hours, it was separated into two volumes: Kill Bill Volume 1, released in late 2003, and Kill Bill Volume 2, released in early 2004.”
Too long! Too long!
MikeJ
@Murc:
I’d much, much, much rather see Casablanca at 102 minutes than any movie ever made with a elf in it that goes over two hours.
danielx
Is there any prize for not offering an explanation? Because there is no justification other than box office boffo.
@Amir Khalid:
All too true. I figure that if they get the rights to the Silmarillion, Peter Jackson will be ready to retire or drop over dead by the end of the fourth installment. Might could he makes it to the sixth, he’s lost a lot of weight.
Culture of Truth
The Steve Jobs story is being broken into 5 movies! Why?!
Not really, but I wanted to start an apple/PC flame thread
Chris T.
@mechwarrior online: OMG! It’s the story of the last 30 years of the GOP!
mechwarrior online
@Evelyn:
Galadrial is in the book, she’s on the White Council, which is referenced as working on something important (they go to war with the Which King) but that’s it.
liberal
Yahoo! news has an article claiming that Lech Walesa effectively endorsed Romney.
PaulW
They had to add 120 more minutes of Gollum awesomeness?
Culture of Truth
I wanted to see Harry go bust up the Ministry of Magic with his new superwand. Oh well.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Tom Q:
Cimino’s biggest problem is that he was working from behind from day one, with tons of actors, extras, techs, craft services, etc. standing around the set while the director tried to figure out a shot.
Jackson shoots and shoots and shoots as did Cimino, but he has the option of serializing his film- this offsets costs through ticket sales, dvd sales and downloads, the last two unavailable to Cimino’s investors at the time he was shooting Heaven’s Gate. And Jackson can add or subtract things from the shot off-set, with digital technology that Cimino didn’t have.
Amir Khalid
@danielx:
@Evelyn:
I could go for a Tales From The Silmarillion movie franchise, if they pick the right stories.
Culture of Truth
@liberal: Yeah I posted that on an earlier BJ thread.
Villago Delenda Est
@Culture of Truth:
I’d settle for an extended cruciation of the Umbridge woman, myself.
AxelFoley
OT, but anybody else watching Women’s Polo in the Olympics? Just noticing all the underwater shots we’re getting in the replays. Very stimulating. ;)
Cris (without an H)
And this is exactly what makes it such an enjoyable read. The Hobbit has a tidy, satisfying narrative, and it gives you just enough glimpse of a rich fantasy world to tickle your imagination. Basically, it covers the same overall arc as the Lord of the Rings, without dwelling on so many details.
I, like others here, tend to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt. But I really hope he keeps the entirety of The Hobbit in a single film and uses the other two for his Tolkien-fan-fic wanking.
Calouste
Apparently the New Zealand Tourist Council had some promotion budget left.
MattR
@jon: Great. So I can’t think of a single example of a planned two part movie.
BGinCHI
C.R.E.A.T.H.
piratedan
really? outrage over MORE Hobbitses?
They remake Spiderman after less than a decade, Batman’s on his second revision and we’re now redoing Superman for what appears to be a third time and Charlie and Chocolate Factory has already been redone twice now.
Lets not even go into the horror genre and talk about destinations, halloweens or the 13ths….much less stepping it ups and fockers and all of the other crap that is pumped out there…
at least this has the possibility of mining additional source material and if were gonna trust anyone to do it right, I have few issues with allowing Mr. Jackson to take a swing at it.
kindness
What if Mitt Romney was going to play Bilbo Baggins? How would that change the plot?
redshirt
@Amir Khalid: An awesome story, but waaay too depressing and dark for today’s moviegoers. The story is an extended tale of “How can we screw with the hero”.
Beren and Luthien on the other hand is mostly upbeat and well suited for being on screen. Plus: SAURON-Werewolf! And a talking dog.
salvage
I was shocked they were making it into two, three baffles the shit right out of me.
But if any director has earned trust…
Culture of Truth
Back to the Futures I and II were shot back-to-back and released a year apart, which I believe was a first for the industry.
They knew they would make money and MJF couldn’t play a high school student forever.
redshirt
@Culture of Truth: I thought 2 and 3 were filmed together.
CraigoMc
@Culture of Truth: II and III, actually. The Matrix and Pirates sequels were shot the same way.
Mark S.
@MobiusKlein:
That’s what I’m afraid of.
How many people here have read The Silmarillion? Anyone else have a hard time keeping track of Finwe, Feanor, Findis, Fingolfin, Finarfin, and Fingon? I was never so happy to see Sauron in my life. At least I could remember who he was.
mechwarrior online
@Cris (without an H):
Fair enough, but they are trying to tie the movie into LOTR, and let’s be honest what’s “on paper” in the Hobbit is only remotely tied into LOTR. Namely, Bilbo and the ring. And while the ring is at the guts of LOTR what actually happens in the plot of the Hobbit as presented has virtually nothing to do with it.
Everything that has to do with LOTR is the back story.
That works if you first read The Hobbit and then read LOTR since the back story makes sense all of a sudden. But if you read The Hobbit knowing full well what goes on in LOTR you’re left wondering why the book focuses so much on a bunch of singing and dancing idiot dwarves and a moronic Hobbit when the actual plot and cool stuff is going on somewhere else, it doesn’t work at all.
Mike in NC
@liberal:
I’m all for Mitt Romney running for president of Poland.
Culture of Truth
sorry, of course, II and III
BGinCHI
C.R.E.A.M.E.
Culture of Truth
At the time it was considered a financial risk – what if no one likes Part II? As it happens, it was not well received, but thankfully Part III the Western one was. Personally I thought Part II was clever but then I didn’t hate Temple of Doom so my judgment is suspect.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@roc:
Yep. From serialization to effects to marketing and licensing. One important distinction that favors Jackson, though: Lucas ain’t writing these films.
SatanicPanic
@Mark S.: Feanor created the silmarils. Can’t tell you what the others did. They’re like one of those families that decides everyone should have the same initials.
burnspbesq
O the prevailing T:
US men’s gymnasts crash (literally) and burn (figuratively).
Fifth place in the team competition.
Culture of Truth
Someone please explain to me why Mitt Romney is running for President. Bonus points for anyone who can do it without mentioning egomania, money or daddy issues.
CraigoMc
@Culture of Truth: I thought Part II was better than III – the timeline mess is much more interesting than simply traveling to yet another era. (Not that III is a bad film, just much less innovative.)
I love Temple of Doom. The Spielberg who disowned it is the same guy who took the gun out of E.T.
jl
@Mark S.:
” Finwe, Feanor, Findis, Fingolfin, Finarfin, and Fingon? ”
Make a nice line up for a song and dance troupe, tough. I say go Bollywood on those Hobbits. Any promising romantic leads there?
You can always work in a few hours of hacking and magic force field pushy fights. Post production if you want.
I think the Yogo, or whoever the eff the little Star Wars elf Fung shwei teacher dude was, bouncing around like an old tennis ball was comedy gold. Go right in with Bollywood production numbers.
I smell win, I smell bucks. Get me Jackson on the line, pronto.
Matt in HB
Having just started re-reading the Hobbit this summer, after probably 25 years, I think there is a lot more room for Jackson to add his own interpretation to the story. The Hobbit was written before LoTR and there are certain inconsistencies in there between the two stories. One example I just noticed is the characterization of the elves in Mirkwood. In the Hobbit they’re led by a king, there is no mention of the Galadriel (at least not that I’ve seen so far), and they’re described as being nearly as greedy and gold-hungry as the dwarves. All of which is a bit different from the wood elves from LoTR — the movies in particular.
The Hobbit is really a children’s story, I think based on stories Tolkien told his own children. The narrative is very different from LoTR; it’s a lot of this happened, and then this happened, and would you believe that this other silly thing happened next. So, Jackson may want to change things up a bit to tie it into his LoTR movies in terms of tone, and setting, and back-story. There is probably plenty of material that isn’t directly from The Hobbit, but in Tolkien’s notes and other writings that could add significantly to the story Jackson wants to tell.
The Other Chuck
The Scouring of the Shire … was absolute shit. It was an absolutely shitty ending tacked on that didn’t drive the story whatsoever, and was basically a transparent piece of polemic against the “shabby destruction” of the English countryside. It deserves to be cast out along with the Star Wars prequels and the other two Matrix movies. I’m glad Jackson stuck to his guns.
Oh and further kudos to giving Tom Bombadil the axe as well.
jwb
@jl: Elveses not Hobbitses.
Amir Khalid
@Culture of Truth:
The White House is on his bucket list.
burnspbesq
This strikes me as downright bizarre.
Manchester United’s new shirt sponsor is … Chevrolet.
Joel
Just look at the success of the famed “King Solomon’s Mines” trilogy.
Joel
Just look at the success of the famed “King Solomon’s Mines” trilogy.
cckids
@Cassidy:
I agree. He took a guy who was a pretty unlikable, arrogant character from the book & made him human & memorable. And nobody does dying like Sean Bean.
Culture of Truth
@CraigoMc: So, our twisted minds think alike….
catclub
@SatanicPanic: But his wife was probably insanely hot. And the Hobbits never noticed.
Jamey
Because.
It’s. Going. To. Suck.
jayjaybear
@TheF79: Don’t get me started on Turin the emo-boy. Gah…if there was a possible way to make things way worse than they already were, Turin would find it, because he was emo before emo was cool. “Oh, woe is me, I am an outcast!” “Oh, woe is me, I killed my buddy!” “Oh, woe is me, I abandoned the only non-relative who was into me and she died!” “Oh, woe is me, I married my sister!”
SHUT! UP! Already!
No, I haven’t managed to get through the version in the Sil more than once in 30 years. Never even tried to pick up the full novel version. Bleah…
jayjaybear
@cckids: Well, he’s had so much practice…
DaddyJ
More time for fart jokes, dope-smoking-hobbits and closeups of people messily eating tomatoes, I guess.
redshirt
@Joel: I’m more of a “Remo Williams” fan myself.
It was intended to be a trilogy! Does that count?
p.a.
JRRT wrote some post-coronation scenes set in Minas Tirith with Gandalf, Gimli and the hobbits discussing the Quest of Erebor and how it fit into Gandalf’s plans to defeat Sauron. They were not included in LOTR, but would fit into an expanded The Hobbit. (It’s in Unfinished Tales) And don’t forget, part of the reason for the length of LOTR (the book) is the fact that the hobbits were morons. Everything had to be explained to them- by Gandalf, Bombadil, Strider, Elrond, Treebeard, Faramir, Theoden, even Denethor. Count how much of the book is characters sitting around lecturing the hobbits. Of course, they were risking their lives, so they deserved to know how things in Middle Earth got to the point they did. It may be to Jackson’s credit that the exposition in the movies went as well as it did. In The Hobbit Bilbo knew most of what he needed right from the start.
The Children of Hurin would make a great
moviemovies.Cris (without an H)
And that’s the immense risk of producing the Hobbit film after the trilogy, which probably does help to explain why Jackson sees fit to expand it. He wants to capture the fans of the LOTR films who didn’t read the book, who would come away from the Hobbit going “aww man where was Legolas?” Do those people exist? Maybe.
I just think it’s a pity. As far as I’m concerned, The Hobbit should be thought of as if it’s not even part of the same narrative as LOTR. They take place in the same mythology, but they’re two completely separate stories. Attempts to make them sync up perfectly (as even the greatest nerd of all, JRR himself, tried with his rewrite of “Riddles in the Dark”) strike me as misguided — it’s like trying to come up with a way to reconcile the inconsistent portrayals of Batman or Captain Kirk under different writers, when the simple answer is “they can’t be reconciled, this is fiction, not archaeology.”
Jamey
@Calouste: Money previously earmarked for Season Three of “Flight of the Conchords”?
burnspbesq
@The Other Chuck:
The only good thing Tom Bombadil ever did was serve as the inspiration for a Nickel Creek song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ2p04GWGEk&feature=related
mechwarrior online
@Matt in HB:
Not the same group of elves, there are more than just Galadriels and Elronds. Galadriel and Elrond are on the White Council and they have rings which makes them the defacto leaders, but they are hardly the only group.
And the elves are assholes in LOTR as well, they aren’t nice people. They look down and shit on all the other races that aren’t as pretty and perfect as they are and are pretty blatant about “we are better than you because you are ugly and we are pretty and fair, so suck it scum”. In LOTR the only reason they don’t kill off the party is because of Legolas, they still threaten to though. Hell they even talk down to Gandalf… and out of all the humans the only one that they don’t instantly write off as “ugly, lacking of fair, dark scum” is Aragorn and even then they are pretty clear that humans are rather silly.
The movie white washes over a lot of this, but the elves are pretty huge jackasses to everybody that is not an elf, it’s kinda their thing.
redshirt
@DaddyJ: You knew Denethor was crazy by the way he ate tomatoes. Truth!
jayjaybear
@burnspbesq: Also, serving as inspiration for Tim Benzedrine from Bored of the Rings…
cckids
@burnspbesq: Hey, put out a spoiler alert or something, jeez.
catclub
@AxelFoley: “Women’s Polo in the Olympics?”
Women’s _Water_ Polo?
I did not know horses could swim so well.
cintibud
One possibility I haven’t seen discussed yet is the back story on how the Shire was such a peaceful place in a land so filled with dangers. To do so a movie would show how the shire was protected by the Northern Kingdom, led by the descendents of Isildur, from the evils of the Witch King. Indeed, in the final days of the kingdom the Shire sent a company of archers to the defense of Fornorst (sp), never to be heard from again. However, before the Witch King could overrun the North, the over-late forces of Gondor and Rivendale arrived and totally kicked butt. As the last of the WK’s forces were wiped out, he disappeared into the darkness. When the forces of Gondor tried to follow, they were warned (would be by Elrond in a movie, was a different character in book), the WK would not be killed by a “man”.
As a Tolkien geek, I would enjoy that, but as a Tolkien geek, I don’t trust Peter Jackson not to screw with it. However, he could have done much worse with LOTR.
redshirt
@catclub: Better than Water Polio.
Ron
@Mark S.: I’ve started reading The Silmarillion at least 3 times and just couldn’t get through it all. I usually gave up pretty early. It’s kind of like trying to read the Bible for entertainment.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
That’s ‘cos the last book of the Return of the King goes on interminably. He left out the Scouring of the Shire (which I think was a mistake), which would have added 30 minutes at least to the film.
SatanicPanic
@catclub: Another reason why I am annoyed by Tom Bombadil. He’s like some old hippie who’s somehow managed to get a 22 year old girlfriend. yech. Probably totally hot though.
redshirt
@Ron: If you can’t get through the beginning (I love it, but can understand why some would not), skip ahead. The stories are only loosely connected and you can certainly read “Beren and Luthein” for example without missing much by skipping the beginning.
GG
As the Tolkien Estate still owns rights to The Silmarillion and the rest of the background writings, the chance of movie rights being sold are approaching nil, at least until the older 2 generations of heirs are gone. Too bad, the Beren & Luthien story could be a pretty cool film, the vampires and werewolves notwithstanding.
I’m ok with 3 Hobbit films, but my preference for the 3rd movie to be a lotta bridge material seems unlikely to happen, if it’s true that principal photography is well and truly wrapped. Balin in Moria, young Aragorn, maybe angsty Hobbity stuff with Frodo’s parents drowning and Bilbo adopting him, the hunt for Gollum, Sauron’s emissary coming to Dale & Erebor, and on and on: none of that is going to have been filmed at this point. So I must wonder just what we’ll see. Endless battle scenes, meh.
And it’s “Late again, West Coast Scum.” Sorry.
Amir Khalid
@jayjaybear:
My favorite marching song from Bored of The Rings:
Two, four, six, eight
Tiptoe, sneak and infiltrate!
Cha-cha-cha.
Cris (without an H)
Hey guys I just had an idea: The Hobbit as Rashomon. They can make the first movie as a straight-up adaptation of the book, nothing added. Then the second movie can be “The Hobbit, as seen by Gandalf” where we rewind and see all the stuff that Bilbo didn’t know about.
I don’t have a plan for the narrative angle in the third one yet.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@p.a.:
Yeah, uhm, that might be because the hobbits were, ya know, proxies for the readers, don’t ya think? It’s not like the general reading public knew the history and politics of Middle Earth when Fellowship was published.
ericblair
@The Other Chuck:
Yeah, that, since it was an unnecessary revanchist anticlimactic add-on, I’m glad that was gone. Also, Sam in the book is a horribly servile toady, contrasted with the loyal friend in the movies. The female characters come off better in the movies, too, although really that’s not saying much since in the books they were mostly distant cardboard cutouts.
So I’m sure Jackson could bollux the Hobbit up badly, but he’s got a pretty good track record from LoTR.
I never got through the Simarillion, myself. I think I fell asleep reading it and hit my head on the coffee table. I don’t know how much Starbucks-and-Addera1l cocktail I’d need to get through it.
Murc
The Shire was such a peaceful place because by and large the land around it was a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Seriously. The remnants of the Dunedain were protecting it, to an extent, but the Shire was a long way from anything important and the Hobbits were the last people standing after Arnor was destroyed. There were no more humans living near them, no orcs, just some elves and dwarves. Sauron stopped caring about that part of the world so completely he didn’t even know that an Arnorian successor state (which is what the Shire was; the land grant comes from the Crown) even existed.
And the Hobbits weren’t precisely defenseless. They fought in both the fall of Arnor and sent men to join the Gondorian host that broke Angmar, and when there as an Orc incursion a few hundred years before the Hobbit they beat them back.
PurpleGirl
Saw Brave yesterday and loved it. There were a bunch of trailers, all of which look good: The Hobbit, Despicable Me 2, Monsters University, Wreck-It Ralph, and Hotel Transylvania. Some really good animation in that list. Also saw a animated short subject — La Luna. If you get a chance to see La Luna, do, it’s cute and will make you smile.
Cris (without an H)
At first I thought you said a Nickelback song.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Ron:
Without the sex.
TOP123
@SatanicPanic: Minor quibble: they didn’t have hippies when the book was written, roughly the years around the Second World War. That said, Bombadil annoyed me when I was first reading and re-reading, but I find I’ve found the character more interesting in recent years. And there’s some interesting stuff out there analysing Bombadil that makes me want to go back in again.
ETA: I see others have already addressed this more thoroughly… sorry!
Herbal Infusion Bagger
When Tolkien was writing the Hobbit, he didn’t know that was going on either. See the Annotated Version of the Hobbit about how Gollum was ret-conned from a fairly benevolent fellow in the First Edition of the Hobbit to the wretched corrupted individual after Tolkien figured out what the Ring really was.
And, for all the criticism of Jackson, the evil and temptation from the ring comes through a lot stronger in the film than the book. Jackson’s version of the Breaking of the Fellowship is a lot better than Tolkien’s, where you’re left wondering why Aragorn is pursuing the Uruk-hai who’ve captured Merry and Pippin instead of choosing to help the mission-critical Frodo.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I like the scouring because it’s a better resolution for the characters of Saruman and Wormtongue, and shows the growth of Merry and Pippin from useless eejits into leaders, and shows there was no place in Middle-Earth not touched by the war. I didn’t like the four hobbits returning in the film to a Shire where nothing had changed.
Thinking about it though, it might reflect the times: Tolkien wrote with the experience and scars of WW1 and WW2: Jackson in a world where we essentially contract out our military adventures, and only those who signed up for combat return with the scars. Would that our vets could get Valinor for their PTSD like Frodo.
jon
@MattR: The first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies were planned. Remember the trial of three prisoners in hula hoops in the opening of Superman? Remember how they didn’t appear in the rest of the movie? That may be an obvious two movie plan, since #3 in that series clearly wasn’t part of any plan.
Brachiator
@Linda Featheringill:
Well, that’s kinda what the book is about.
Original Lee
My understanding is that Peter Jackson paid for permission to use notes, unfinished stories, and other material from the Tolkien estate, so he’s going to use it. I think I heard rumors of a movie version of The Silmarillion, too, so if that ever comes to pass, Jackson will have created the movie equivalent of the Robert Jordan series.
Matt in HB
@mechwarrior online:
Thanks for a little more info. I guess I was under the impression that Galadriel was the queen of all of Mirkwood and not just part of it.
As for the Elves being haughty jerks in both the Hobbit and LoTR, that’s a bit different from what I was getting at. Yes, in LoTR the elves look down on everyone, but dwarves in particular because of their greedy acquisitive nature. The elves in the Hobbit are described as being just as greedy.
In any case, the more important part is that due to the publishing timeline for all of Tolkien’s books, there is sufficient difference in tone and some characterizations between the Hobbit and LoTR that Jackson might take the opportunity to make his Hobbit more in line with his LoTR, and potentially a less pure version of the Hobbit book.
Matt in HB
@mechwarrior online:
Thanks for a little more info. I guess I was under the impression that Galadriel was the queen of all of Mirkwood and not just part of it.
As for the Elves being haughty jerks in both the Hobbit and LoTR, that’s a bit different from what I was getting at. Yes, in LoTR the elves look down on everyone, but dwarves in particular because of their greedy acquisitive nature. The elves in the Hobbit are described as being just as greedy.
In any case, the more important part is that due to the publishing timeline for all of Tolkien’s books, there is sufficient difference in tone and some characterizations between the Hobbit and LoTR that Jackson might take the opportunity to make his Hobbit more in line with his LoTR, and potentially a less pure version of the Hobbit book.
jon
@Cris (without an H): There are thirteen dwarves/dwarfs/whateverthefuckingspellingis*
*And no, people with access to the “canon”: I don’t care.
Original Lee
My understanding is that Peter Jackson paid for permission to use notes, unfinished stories, and other material from the Tolkien estate, so he’s going to use it. I think I heard rumors of a movie version of The Silmarillion, too, so if that ever comes to pass, Jackson will have created the movie equivalent of the Robert Jordan series.
gelfling545
Because 3 is the new 1 in movieland
gelfling545
Because 3 is the new 1 in movieland
Cris (without an H)
Speaking of movies that shouldn’t be made (weren’t we?), :
Believe it or not, many commenters seem quite keen on the idea of “exploring the backstory of the Overlook hotel.” I’m starting to think that geeks, who pride themselves on consuming imaginative fiction, are the least imaginative people on the planet.
elmo
@Amir Khalid:
Oh the leaves are falling
The flowers are wilting
And the rivers are all turning Republican.
We are the chorus and we agree,
We agree, we agree, we agree.
rlrr
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’ve read there’s going to be a lot of back story from the appendices at the end of Return of the King. Also, at one point Jackson & co were planning on making another Middle Earth movie which was not the Hobbit when it looked like they were not going to be able to get the film rights, so maybe they incorporated some of that material…
Anne Laurie
@SatanicPanic:
Literature FAIL. Tom Bombadil was Tolkien’s (rather less than successful) attempt to graft the “low folklore” Green Man of Olde England (the Father God of Hobbitfolk, give or take) into the “high folklore” quasi-Celtic Faire Folk of the Celts. He didn’t do a very good job of joinery — as he was the first to admit, if I recall the letters he wrote to fellow Inklings back when LotR was extremely highbrow fanfic — but Bombadil was neither a “dig” nor directed at “hippies” who hadn’t been born yet.
Tolkien started LotR as a “grand synthesis” of everything he considered most supremely beautiful & important about The Most Wonderful Apex Empire in the History of the World, i.e., Victorian Britain… just as the British Empire was falling to bits. (Also, as the other Inklings kept reminding each other, JRR was not really a true Englishman, having been born in South Africa to a Boer.)
The other chunk of the LotR literature that visibly fails to “mesh”, the Scouring of the Shire, was Tolkien’s emotion-driven reaction to the post-World-War destruction of the “time-honored English heritage” class system (God bless the squire & his relations / And keep us all in our proper stations). The Celtic-via-medieval-Norman-chivalric-tales Elven-stories are a world entirely apart from “ours” — as others have said, Tolkien’s elves are true descendants of the Sidhe, the “Fair People” who, in Irish legend, live forever because they have no hearts to be broken.
rlrr
@Murc:
. There were no more humans living near them,
There were humans in Bree…
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Matt in HB:
Actually, she’s the queen of none of it. She’s the co-ruler (along with her s.o., Celeborn) of Lothlorien. Mirkwood, at least at the time of The Hobbit and LOTR, is ruled by Thranduil. Thranduil’s father, Oropher, founded the Elven kingdom there.
brendan sexton
@Villago Delenda Est: “BTW, Palin has NOT been invited to the shindig, supposedly she’s going to hold court somewhere nearby, but is persona non grata at the convention itself.”
given the way Mitt is going, i believe the convention will turn away from him and nominate Sarah!
brendan sexton
@Villago Delenda Est: “BTW, Palin has NOT been invited to the shindig, supposedly she’s going to hold court somewhere nearby, but is persona non grata at the convention itself.”
given the way Mitt is going, i believe the convention will turn away from him and nominate Sarah!
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Matt in HB:
That’s probably because of the influence of Sauron lurking in Mirkwood, as the Necromancer, at Dol Guldur. Other elves aren’t shone in a similar light.
Elves weren’t, generally, depicted as greedy. Corruptible, sure- see Galadriel when she didin’t accept the ring from Frodo- but generally wise enough to avoid corruption.
SatanicPanic
@Anne Laurie: People are getting all hung up on my use of hippies- pacifists work better? Dropouts? There’s a giant threat to Middle Earth that Tom clearly understands but he doesn’t care enough to do anything about. Maybe you could think of that as a positive portrayal, but that sounds like a stretch to me.
DaddyJ
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Absolutely. The Scouring of the Shire is the “narrative mistake” that makes LOTR one of the great works of fantasy. It’s not the ring that’s evil; it is the will to power — the disease of looking at others as cogs in your machine. A disease that can infect anyone: Elves, wizards, humans and even down-to-earth hobbits.
Without the Scouring, the trilogy would have dried up and blown away decades ago.
I understand why Jackson didn’t include it (his LOTR would have been four movies, for one thing) but I still regret it.
rael
@Cassidy: agreed about Jackson getting LOTR right, except for the trashing of Faramir. I still can’t believe he dissed one of my favorite characters and mangled the friends on the road well met scene. i’m still pissed, now i think of it. :-)
rael
@Cassidy: agreed about Jackson getting LOTR right, except for the trashing of Faramir. I still can’t believe he dissed one of my favorite characters and mangled the friends on the road well met scene. i’m still pissed, now i think of it. :-)
rael
oops
jon
@Original Lee: Nope. The Tolkien family hated the movies (all of them, from the animated catastrophes to the latest ones,) and the only reason the Hobbit took so long to be filmed is that the production rights were in one studio and the distribution rights with another. Once the potential pile of money was big enough, the studios were able to iron out their differences. The Silmarillion won’t be happening, since the family still owns the rights.
I want to see Farmer Giles of Ham about twenty times more than any other of his works. A Mister Bliss movie might be a lot of fun, but again that will never happen. His Letters from Father Christmas would also make for entertaining movies, but that family seems determined to be a bunch of grumpy gusses telling those fans to get off his lawn. Copyright laws should be amended just for those fuckers, sucking on their old man’s legacy just for spite.
redshirt
I forget where I read it – or maybe I dreamt it – but wasn’t Bombadil supposed to represent Eru himself? And as such, he’s not overly concerned about anything that happens, as it all fits into his overall design.
This was the “lesson of evil” from the Sil: No matter what manner of evil cooked up by Morgoth/Sauron, it only served to elevate Eru’s creation. Ultimately.
John
Where are people getting the idea that the Witch King was in Dol Guldur? My understanding was that the Nazgul were all in Minas Morgul at the time of The Hobbit, and certainly that the Witch King was.
GG
@SatanicPanic: I’m not trying to make you change your mind – even Tolkien recognized that Tom Bombadil doesn’t suit every reader.
This is what Tolkien himself says about Bombadil:
I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out… he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature… Link
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@John:
I think they were confusing the Witch King and the Necromancer. It really isn’t hard to do when so many characters are known by multiple names.
rael
@Ron: skip the music of the ainur bit at the beginning. the rest is pretty cool.
John
@jon:
Christopher Tolkien, who is his father’s literary executor hates all the movies. I know that Christopher’s son Simon was a fan of the films and actually basically broke off with his father over the disagreement. I’ve never heard anything specific about the opinions of the other members of the family.
Christopher is getting up there in years; he’s 87, and he won’t live forever. His two older brothers have been dead for years, and his sister is 83. I’m really dubious that the grandchildren are going to be as fastidious about the film rights to the other Tolkien materials as Christopher has been, given the enormous amounts of money to be made. I’d be very surprised if the rights to The Silmarillion and the various other Middle-Earth materials aren’t sold off as soon as Christopher has been in the ground for a respectable period – likely within the next decade.
Whether a successful adaptation of the Silmarillion can be done is another question entirely. The work as a whole seems almost unadaptable. I could see decent adaptations of the Beren and Luthien story, and perhaps of the Turin story (although that is so depressing it’s hard to see it being a giant blockbuster of the sort that would be needed to justify the expense) or the Tuor and Gondolin story (although that one is so bare bones that the film-makers would not have much Tolkien material to work with, unless they want to use the virtually unreadable very early version, written in purposefully archaic language). Or maybe the whole thing could be adapted as a gigantic miniseries.
But the problem with the rights, at any rate, seems likely to be only temporary.
GG
@Anne Laurie: Otoh, Tolkien’s Elves could literally die of broken hearts. I admit, however, some disbelief fails to be suspended when we’re repeatedly told the Elves have “other concerns” than the mortals they share Ennor with. Such as?
John
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Of course, even the White Council thought that the Necromancer was just a Nazgul until Gandalf’s visit to Dol Guldur. I wonder if we’ll get a flashback of that visit in the films, since that’s how Gandalf met Thrain and got the map.
Thoroughly Pizzled
Tom Bombadil is the most evil entity in all Ea, more devious than Sauron, more wicked than Morgoth.
Donut
Easy. Did it take you more or less than, say, six to nine hours to read the book? Most books made into films leave tons of relevant shit out, which is why book-to-film productions often suck.
I bet, for example, that there were hours upon hours of footage cut from the LOTR films, btw.
Origuy
Someone’s already made The Hunt for Gollum as an independent fan movie. It’s really well done, considering. They also did Born of Hope, the story of Aragorn’s parents.
Tony J
@Anne Laurie:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but ISTR that Tolkien’s speciality was Anglo-Saxon/Germanic literature and he drew heavily on that for his Middle-Earth mythology. Case in point – Middle-Earth, as in Midgarth = Earth in Norse myth.
His Elves and Dwarves are takes on the Germanic lios alfar and svart alfar. The Silmarillion, especially the parts revolving around the Children of Hurin, are a retelling of the Nibelungenlied, Gandalf is based on aspects of Woden, etc etc.
Granted, Tom Bombadil does come across as a ‘Green Man’ figure, but that myth wasn’t just Celtic. The roots of Celtic and Norse/Germanic mythology came from the same Indo-European sources, after all.
SatanicPanic
@GG: One of the things I like about those books is that not everyone has a clear backstory. It just annoyed me that they take this lengthy detour, meet this guy with incredible power, who says “yeah, that’s pretty bad, you shouldn’t let Sauron have this ring.” “So you gonna help us?” “Not much!” Gyah, that part gets me just thinking about it. Probably would be a great character otherwise.
burnspbesq
@Cris (without an H):
At first I thought you said a Nickelback song.
Nonono. I said “good thing.”
Tony J
@John:
Speaking as someone who loves The Silmarillion, I can’t see it making it as a live-action movie series. It’s all so damned depressing. Thousands of years of falling from a – mostly – perfect world through disaster after disaster, with every small victory won by the good guys just the set-up for another massive failure down the line. The Wars of Beleriand might make for great battle scenes, but bear in mind that the Elven Kingdoms and their human allies are authentically Doomed to be betrayed from within and hammered into the ground, virtually everyone lives in misery and dies horribly before the Valar come to deal with Morgoth.
Oh, and then the few surviving humans get rewarded with a magical island kingdom and long lifespans in which to enjoy it.. until they get gloomy and emo and fall prey to Sauron, who turns them into a bunch of war-mongering devil-worshippers who declare war on the Valar, and virtually everyone lives in misery and dies horribly before the Valar sink the island and it all starts again, with a smaller magical budget and fewer Elves.
Feelgood popcorn blockbuster it ain’t!
grishaxxx
@Anne Laurie:
This reminds me of Margaret’s musings on the lack of a true English mythology in “Howard’s End” – not very heroic, she seems to say, just “elves and fairies.” Tolkien and Forster were close contemporaries, and I wonder whether this was not a widely-held yearning in that post WWI generation of scholars; they’d either been in the trenches of that tragedy (as was JRRT) or, if not, lost compatriots and friends in vast quantities. Biographies of Tolkien, and the enormous series of volumes tracing the genesis of his personal mythology that his son, Christopher, edited, show him trying to rectify that void.
Certainly, his temperament and professional life as a philologist and scholar of virtually all the Northern European epic and mythic literature gave him grounds for comparisons, and as an inventor of fabulous languages, he could go further and mine the Finnish epic “Kalevala” and the the Finnish language itself for, from the former, darkness (it’s pretty creepy), and from the latter, the liquid language of the Elves. He seems never to have had much taste for the Arthurian cycle (too Norman, or something…all those francophone names!), or, perhaps, just not old enough.
Whatever, old was what he seems to have loved most, and even in his inventions, he keeps trying to go back and back, deeper and deeper (some sympathy with his dwarves, I suspect), searching for treasures, mysterie, knowledge lost. Sure, “The Hobbit” started as a kid’s book, a wonderful tale to read at bedtime (or in class, a my 5th-grade teacher did), but as it expanded in LOTR, new editions came with footnotes that Bilbo had not been entirely forthcoming about his encounter with Gollum, and then we have the extra stuff in the LOTR appendices…. There is more story there than – dare I say it – the uninitiated or non-geeky audience necessarily knows about.
So, I think PJ and his collaborators are justified in expanding the tale, and not just for the box office.
And, just for the record, I love the King King expanded edition – whole thing, in fact. Too much (of a good thing) cannot be enough….Cheers!
tomanjeri
Peter Jackson has access to the appendixes of the LotR which has a ton of content. A lot of mentions of The White Council here but that’s just one of many stories that are hinted at and written about in the appendixes and The Hobbit. The Battle of Azanulbizar and the backstory of the Dwarves and their treasure are never dealt with in much detail, bridging Gollum from The Hobbit to the LotR, his capture, escape and descent into madness after he loses the ring to Bilbo, the arrival of Smaug, the falling out between elves and dwarves, etc. There is really a lot alluded to in all the books that isn’t explained they could expand upon.
Patricia Kayden
How long is the Hobbit book? How deep is the story? How difficult are the concepts raised in the story?
I can see 3 films for a lengthy, well written, deep story where just one film wouldn’t do the trick of exploring all the richness of the text.
Yadda yadda yadda. Etc.
rikyrah
they made, what, 2 billion from the LOTR trilogy.
and, if Peter Jackson says he needs 3 movies, he gets 3 movies for The Hobbit
Mr Stagger Lee
@redshirt: I am really Butt-Hurt that Mack Bolan(The Executioner) was never made into
a movie. As for the Destroyer I would love to see another crack at it.
Merrily
No one will miss Legolas.
Have you seen those dwarves?
jon
@Merrily: You won’t have to miss Legolas. But as for those dwarves, I like them.
Jay C
@Anne Laurie:
Regardless of what his pals thought, JRR Tolkien was “truly” English – by blood, anyway: he (and his younger brother) were born in South Africa: but his parents were English: IIRC, Tolkien pere had gone out for work (he was a banker, I think) but it didn’t work out and they had to return to England when Ronald was ten(?).
Steeplejack
@MikeJ:
Kudos, sir, for the cedilla. I interviewed Truffaut once. Highlight of my newshound career.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Not that there’s any historical parallel of nations letting a nation with an evil leader greatly increase their military, with feckless leaders on the good side ignoring the threat and not increasing their own defenses, leading to a bloody and brutal war that gets settled at the end by an enormous WMD.
And Tolkien insisted it wasn’t an allegory.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
They owe more, IMHO, in characterization to the Irish sidhe than the ljosalfar. The ljosalfar are mentioned only in passing in one chapter of the Prose Edda, essentially just a list of names, wheras there’s multiple cycles of stories of the sidhe in the Book of Invasions, with characters as complex as Feanor or Finrod (like Lugh Lamh Fada, who’s both a hero and an asshole).
Tolkien was dismissive of Celtic mythology in letters because it was irrational (which is fair enough – the major legend cycle of Ireland, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, is about a war over a bull).
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I’d be kinder to Christopher Tolkien: a lot of his father’s legacy wouldn’t have come to light without his work editing and compiling it (with Guy Gaviel Kay).
Plus, their experience with selling the film rights to Saul Zantz (who really is an obstructionist) has probably made them a bit gun-shy licensing out Tolkien’s other works.
jayjaybear
Christopher Tolkien considers himself the curator of his father’s literary legacy, and I think he’s done a fine job of it, really*. There’s a natural reluctance to hand off the rights to just anyone when he’s spent a considerable portion of his life collating and collecting and cataloguing pretty much every scrap of paper his father ever put pencil or pen to.
*An outstanding job, actually, when you compare it to the kind of legacy-rape that Brian Herbert has committed.
Di
@Linda Featheringill: I agree with you to some extent, but there are some in the story who don’t buy into that as I don’t. The entire work to me is an incredible book and series even if I don’t agree with the religious overtones, Not all the characters do either. And the casting and acting is amazing.