UPDATE: Warner Bros has denied that there are plans for a split.
Here’s a story that seemed to have been ruled out in the run-up to this year’s Comic-Con, yet has reappeared. Basically, the rumour had been that the second of Peter Jackson’s two movies of The Hobbit, There And Back Again, would be split into two films. That’d basically make The Hobbit a trilogy, all from one book.
Peter Jackson told Hitfix that “that’s a discussion we’re having, yeah. We have certainly been talking to the studio about some of the material we can't film, and we've been asking them so we can do a bit more filming next year. Which, I don't know what would come of that, whether it'd be extended editions or whatnot. But those discussions are ongoing”.
Jackson’s extra material would come from the appendices, he revealed, which is the stuff “we haven’t been able to squeeze into these movies”.
We’ll find out in due course whether The Hobbit becomes three films, or follows the extended edition path of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy (we'd figured extended cuts would arrive on DVD and Blu-ray anyway, though).
Appreciating that Jackson’s track record more than gives him the right to do what he thinks is correct for the material, the thought of splitting the book into three films is still a mildly troubling one. This follows the announcement last week that the final The Hunger Games book, Mockingjay, was being split into two by Lionsgate. Before that, of course, Harry Potter and Twilight had trodden the same path.
However, as we pointed out in this feature last week, The Hobbit is just one book. That’s one three-act story to split into potentially a trio of three-act stories. Just splitting it into two was already likely to be presenting big challenges. It’ll be interesting to see just how they do that, should they choose to press ahead.
We remain extremely excited by The Hobbit, though, and the first film, An Unexpected Journey, will be arriving this December.
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