THE HOBBIT Might Become a Trilogy!? Jackson Discusses Tone
Director Peter Jackson has already completed production on his two Hobbit films The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again. We now have learned from Jackson himself, there's a possibility we will end up seeing a third Hobbit movie! Jackson shot plenty of additional footage that could be used in a third film, and right now Warner Bros. is actually considering it! The studio owns the rights to the appendices from The Lord Of The Rings which would allow for Jackson to build on what he already has. Jackson recently did an interview with Collider in which Jackson told them,
Well, it’s very, very premature. We have got incredible source material with the appendices. There’s the novel, but then we also have the rights to use the 125 pages of additional notes where Tolkien expanded the world of The Hobbit. We’ve used some of that so far, and just in the last few weeks, as we’ve been wrapping up the shooting and thinking about the shape of the story, Philippa [Boyens], Fran [Walsh] and I have been talking to the studio about other things that we haven’t been able to shoot and seeing if we could possibly persuade them to do a few more weeks of shooting. We’d probably need more than a few weeks, actually, next year. The discussions are pretty early, so there isn’t anything to report, but there are other parts of the story that we’d like to tell, that we haven’t had the chance to tell yet. We’re just trying to have those conversations with the studio, at the moment.
How freakin' cool is that! It would be so awesome if the studio decided to role forward with a third Hobbit film! Why they hell wouldn't they want to do it? Personally I think it's a great idea, and I hope it ends up happening! If they do move forward with it, Jackson would need to go back into production for another few weeks. The director then went on to talk about the tone of the film saying,
… we basically used more source material than just The Hobbit. For instance, in The Hobbit, when Gandalf mysteriously disappears for chapters, it’s never really explained, in any detail, where he’s gone. Much later, Tolkien fleshed those moments out. In these appendices, he did talk about what happened, and it was a lot darker and more serious than what’s written in The Hobbit. Also, to be quite honest, I want to make a series of movies that run together, so if any crazy lunatic wants to watch them all in a row, there will be a consistency of tone. I don’t want to make a purely children’s story, followed by The Lord of the Rings. We are providing a balance. A lot of the comedy and the charm and the fairytale quality of The Hobbit comes from the characters. You are dealing with Bilbo Baggins, who is a little more reluctant, possibly, to go on an adventure than Frodo was. You’re dealing with dwarves who have a personality and a comradery, all of their own. There’s a lot of humor and a lot touch to be gained from those characters, but there’s still some serious themes involved. Hopefully, The Hobbit films will comfortably straddle both worlds.
I loved the footage of the film that was shown at Comic-Con this year! It got me incredibly excited for the film. Sure he didn't show it in 48 frames-per-second or in 3D, but it was still awesome! Jackson had his reasons. First off, the things they show in 3D in Hall H look crappy. Secondly, he wanted the fans to talk about the footage they saw in the film and not the frame rate, which is what everyone focused on at CinemaCon. Here's what he told Deadline,
I went on the internet to see what people thought of the first footage of The Hobbit. And nobody was commenting on the footage, good or bad. Everyone had opinions about the 48 frames. You had the film purists saying, this doesn’t look like cinema, it doesn’t look like film. Well, no, it doesn’t, it’s completely different. Those negative comments were getting picked up and spun around the world by all the bloggers. I didn’t want to risk that at Comic-Con. I wanted people to look at the actors, at the performance, the story, and I didn’t want Comic-Con stories to be all about 48 frames. Especially when it’s only a 12 minute clip reel and it’s in Hall H in a convention center, and not even in a cinema. The 3D looks like crap in that hall, so I wasn’t going to be screening 3D. I just wanted the focus to be the movie.
Fact of the matter is, fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are going to love this movie! Jackson isn't going to let us down, and hopefully he gets to make that third film! Would you like to see a third Hobbit movie in his Middle Earth series?
