We were just talking about this. And by this, I mean the modern movie trend of milking every blockbuster for two sequels regardless of whether or not the first installment in fact contained a complete story. (Some of you interpreted this as us saying that Peter Jackson invented the entire concept of the trilogy, when what we actually said, pretty clearly, was that his success with The Lord of the Rings caused Hollywood to realize that a trilogy was a package that audiences seemed to respond to, and therefore it begot a trend of booking single movies as trilogy beginnings before they even arrived in theaters, regardless of whether they were a story originally conceived as being told in three large parts.)
But I digress. Last weekend we brought you the rumor that Peter Jackson was in talks with his studio about the mountains of extra footage he’d like to shoot for The Hobbit. The question then was whether it would be making itself into the second film, or DVD extras, or what. Now, according to some pretty reliable sources, Jackson and Co. are in talks with producers and New Line to see if the money can be shuffled around and the deals made to stretch The Hobbit to three movies.
Allow me to borrow a meme from the Avengers fandom to express my reservations:
Jackson’s argument, presumably, is the one he made informally at Comic Con, which is that there’s a lot of material in the six appendices of The Lord of the Rings, packaged in the last pages of every copy of The Return of the King, that he’d like to bring to life. I’m going to assume that he’s only talking about two of those appendices, because the rest are made up of family trees, calendars, pronunciation guides, and linguistic notes. Any studio with two brain cells to rub together will get on board with this, provided actor contracts and rights can be acquired or renewed. It’s a license to print money.
But Peter. Remember the last time we just let you put everything you wanted into a movie? We got King Kong. And while every time somebody makes this point in a fan community they get shouted down by people who’d rather see “more” than “best” I’ll say it again: the “concise” has its place. And a very important place, too. Tell us the story of The Hobbit, peter. Then, tell us other stories. Make the third movie about whatever you want, Arwen and Aragorn, the Fall of Númenór, Dwarves in Moria, I don’t care. But please please, get Bilbo back to Bag End by the end of the second one.
I’ll make you a deal: you give me three The Hobbit movies that clock in at less than two hours each, and I’ll let you make them.
(via The Hollywood Reporter.)
