Liked it well enough (caveat: saw it in non-3D, non-48-frames-per-second-vision), but I have no idea how they think they get three movies out of this when the movie ends, unsurprisingly, about halfway through the damn book, and that is with all the extra stuff from the Indexes to LOTR thrown in and more besides.
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Two. They’re doing two, not three. You’re the second source to claim there are three, after the Onion.
Good gods, even Wikipedia says three. Clearly the entirety of Reality is just plain Wrong on this topic.
http://screenrant.com/hobbit-3-movie-trilogy/ “Peter Jackson Confirms ‘The Hobbit 3’ For Summer 2014.
It was originally 2, and somehow he convinced them to do 3.
Basically it is “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”
“The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.”
and “The Hobbit: There and Back Again.” (Source for titles: IMDB.)
You don’t?
They managed to get about three hours out of about half the book.
If the next two are two hours each, that should be plenty. Especially since the back half of The Hobbit skims over a lot of things that the movies will, clearly, spend a lot of time lingering over. I mean, the Battle of Five Armies, which doesn’t take up a very high page count? They can probably get like forty-five minutes out of that by itself.
I initially thought the exact same thing, but it seems clear that Peter Jackson has committed not only to adapting ‘The Hobbit,’ but to telling the story of everything going on at the same time that led up to ‘Lord of the Rings.’
When Tolkien first wrote ‘The Hobbit,’ he had Gandalf leave the story at the entrance to Mirkwood more or less to get him out of the way, so that Bilbo and the dwarves could deal with the dragon themselves without the benefit of a powerful wizard. But it’s important to keep in mind that, according to the story, Gandalf had to leave because he had more important things to do– Thorin’s quest was just not as critical as the other stuff going on offstage. Peter Jackson is going to show us what that really important stuff was.
So we will not just see the spiders in Mirkwood, the destruction of Dale, the Battle of Five Armies, etc.– we will also see the machinations of the Necromancer, the slow corruption of Saruman, and the battle of the White Council to destroy Sauron before he fully manifests.
And all that is apart from the really tangential stuff that Peter Jackson enjoys exploring, like moving Radagast onstage, and how he turned a passing Appended reference about Thorin’s grudge against Azog into about twenty extra minutes of film.
At the very least, the third movie will also feature a wizard battle that will flatten central Mirkwood; now that the first movie has set all that up, there can’t very well not be.
They’ve covered 79 of 210 pages of my copy. Which is a teensy bit more than 1/3, but not dramatically more.
The title of the third film makes me think they might be going into some detail on Bilbo’s trip home. Which was thoroughly uneventful in the book, and from a storytelling perspective makes no sense — Bilbo didn’t leave any unfinished business behind him, so there’s no point dwelling on him stopping his relatives from nicking his stuff, after the epic battle.
So here’s hoping for two straight hours of goblins, elves, dwarves and men stabbing the shit out of each other, complete with some truly epic music when the dwarves of the Iron Hills and the eagles arrive.
im sorry, i really didnt like the film. despite being beautifully made and well cast and acted. it was just nothing but empty calories… constant stimulation, barely any story. also, i hated the overbearing soundtrack.
I know this is going to be considered sacrilege, but I enjoyed The Hobbit a lot more than Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King.
I wasn’t crazy about the scenes with Ian Holm and Elijah Wood, but otherwise I was immensely entertained and glad to see how much stuff from the book made it in.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of the weirder stuff in the movie, such as Radagast’s side story or the character designs for the goblins (and the goblins being a separate race from the orcs, for that matter) were ideas Del Toro came up with before he backed out.
So, maybe we should be relieved that the movie is mostly fan service for Tolkien nerds instead of something that doesn’t actually bear much resemblance to the book.
Brian T – I wouldn’t say I dug it more than FOTR, but it was FAR better than ROTK. Maybe it’s just me liking stories with a smaller scale than ‘SAVE THE WORLD’, but Thorin’s quest resonated a lot more than ‘oh, let’s fight the concept of evil itself.’
But I’m probably the target audience, given I know NOTHING of the books.
I live in fear that Jackson will be working on the third movie, and find himself still over an hour short with every little scrap of Tolkienania that he could find, and announce, with a heavy sigh, that they’ve no choice: they’ll have to bring Tom Bombadil in.
Don’t be silly, Halloween Jack. Tom Bombadil is getting his OWN trilogy.
The Tolerably Bodacious Ballads of Sir Tom Bombaldi!
Personally, I’m waiting for the film version of ‘Bored of the Rings’, complete with Tim Benzedrine!
Thus speaking, the withered apparition raised his spidery hand in a two-fingered “V” sign and uttered an eldritch spell:
“Tim, Tim Benzedrine!
Hash! Boo! Valvoline!
Clean! Clean! Clean for Gene!
First, second, neutral, park,
Hie thee hence, you leafy narc!
Apparently they’re going to actually be showing the part where Gandalf goes after the Necromancer, and that will take up much of the next movie, along with fighting Smaug. Then the third movie will largely be the battle for the mountain.