Jocundry:
You can read the Hobbit over a weekend. The Trilogy takes a good month at least (and that's with some hard core reading).

Why on (middle) earth would you stretch the Hobbit into three movies?

? How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy? Especially if you're reading it intensely as someone who hasn't read it and is eager to find out what happens. I could (and have) read through the *trilogy* in a weekend. And while I read faster than almost everyone I know, it's not 15 times faster.

movie one is them trying to convince Bilbo to join them and the trolls and seeking shelter in the snow storm... END with introduction of Golum
movie 2 is outwitting Golum. escape from the goblins, trip through Mirkwood with spiders then off to the mountain... END with introduction of Smaug.
movie 3 is tricking Smaug into revealing his weak spot, Smaug killed, big battle free for all (including all but Golum, the trolls and spiders), end of battle, return home. END

YUP... should be a 2-3 hr movie..... :(

Maybe he always intended for there to be Banthas in Rivendell... now the technology exists for him to achieve his vision!

I figured Jackson would make two movies out of the Hobbit. One with Bilbo and his adventures finding the Ring, and the other movie with the dwarves fighting the Dragon and the Five Army battle, with Gandalf and the other wizards fleshing out both movies as they go after the Necromancer. A third movie stretches the available plots out way too thin, unless Jackson is going to add a lot more into all three out of his own imagination or something.

Lipo: JackieRabbit: How the hell is he going to make this short book into three movies? The only thing I can see is that there's going to be a lot of historical things pertaining to Gandalf and scenes off what he does when he leaves Bilbo's and Thorin's comany. That will all have to be made up, of course. Though he may be able to borrow some from The Silmarillion.

I read where they're taking a lot of info from the Appendices, although how much of that pertains to the Hobbit I don't recall as it's been a really long time since I read through them. It would be pretty cool if they showed the origin of the elves, the grey havens, and all of that, however, perhaps get into the history of the Kings of Numenor, the Dunedain, and so on, but I doubt they do, as much of it isn't directly relevant to the book.

all that stuff is in the Silmarillion. An awesome read, but be prepared to reference the index ALOT.

Xlr8urfark: snowybunting: Pay to see 3 films again? No Way!

"The international ensemble cast also includes (in alphabetical order) John Bell, Jed Brophy, Adam Brown, John Callen, Billy Connolly, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry, Ryan Gage, Mark Hadlow, Peter Hambleton, Barry Humphries, Stephen Hunter, William Kircher, Evangeline Lilly,..... "


Oh. Here's my money.

Mine too.

For those unfamiliar with this particular hottie:
[www.topnews.in image 400x405]

Awesome cast and she is pretty and will make a good Elf Maiden. Here is some more eye candy from the cast. Unfortunately, the gorgeous Aidan Turner will be in Dwarf make-up playing Kili.



Richard Armitage is pretty nice, too, and will also be in Dwarf make-up as Thorin...

Asterix: Asterix: I would kill to see a Sauron biographical over the different ages. Has anyone ever broached this?

I might add... "As a proper adult epic" devoid unnecessary fluffyness of the Hobbit. There is enough material in the Silmarillion to cover political intruigues, his human aspects... frustration with herp derps and his subsequent turn to darkness etc. a-la Game of Thrones.

I think the problem is that the "turn to darkness" is right at the beginning when he is recruited by Melkor. Like most of the evil Maia, we never get to see him in a "good" state. It's true that he's kind of the central character in the legendarium, but he doesn't really have much of a character arc.

MadSkillz: This is one of those things where they're going to film an additional 360 minutes of actual movie, and then for the footage they have, let each scene linger on just a little too long, aren't they? (i.e. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1)

The hobbit is a simple tale in which these things happen:

Bilbo meets dwarves.
They go out on some gay-ass adventure for no definable reason.
Trolls try to each them; outwitted by sun.
They meet people who are also bears or some shiat.
Bilbo meets Gollum and steals his ring.
They escape scary forest with asshole elves.
Epic fight with dragon.
The end.

That's like a nice, tight two hour movie. Or a three hour movie if you add in all the 'songs' that have no meter or rhyming.

Then it was 2 movies. Now 3, because god-forbid should the money train end.

/despite complaints, will still see it.

What about the spiders?

CAN'T WAIT!! First time I read The Hobbit was in fifth grade and I've read it many, many, many times since. Starting it again on Sept 1st.

Going to see it opening night for the first, second and third screening. Yah, I'm pulling an all nighter! Living on the razors edge cuz that's how I journey! Ok, I'm not so young anymore and I probably sound like a dork.... oh well.. I could care less..

After I run out of people to go with I'll just go by myself like I did with the LOTR movies.


The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (December 14, 2012) Ticket notification
The Hobbit: There and Back Again (December 13, 2013) Ticket notification

alwaysjaded: Manny Calavera: alwaysjaded: Yea, you're right. I guess all that stuff Tolkien wrote in the appendix's was just a little filler and not important at all.

Yes, exactly.

Wait, were you being sarcastic?

I don't even know anymore.

My view on this is probably nothing short of heretical: The Hobbit, which I loved growing up and still think very fondly of, is simply just not that momentous a novel that it requires this kind of attention. It's a minor piece of literature, a charming simple story with few significant or complex characters (but lots of interchangeable dwarves) that requires a minimum amount of exposition to get across to film.

In other words, if Jackson resorts to dredging up the dull and amorphous plot pieces from the Appendices and various LOTR driftwood, is this still a screen adaption of the Hobbit or just Jackson throwing material at the screen and hoping to impress us by sheer volume? We recognise the merit of economy of storytelling in all other kinds of films and genres, so why do so many people act as if this one should be exempt--as if the fact we theoretically could show everything that might have happened in the story is enough to justify doing so?

Case in point:

Optimus Primate: You feebs complaining that there's not enough material for 3 movies are really showing your ignorance of the book. The Hobbit itself fits perfectly into a three-act format:

There and Back Again....to the bank.

Also, the JarJar will be the Marsh Wiggle, Puddleglum.

JackieRabbit: How the hell is he going to make this short book into three movies? The only thing I can see is that there's going to be a lot of historical things pertaining to Gandalf and scenes off what he does when he leaves Bilbo's and Thorin's comany. That will all have to be made up, of course. Though he may be able to borrow some from The Silmarillion.

I'm guessing he's borrowing from the Simarillion. And also, unlike the book, since the overarching importance of the ring is known to 99% of the people going to watch the movie, so it makes a possible back story. Also, I can see trying to tie together the end of the Hobbit to the start of Fellowship. There's a nice fat gap there which can be filled.

I'm still not sure how I feel about dragging it out, but I'll remain hopeful it's engaging. I'm just having a hard time finding sufficent "climax" moments to spread to three movies. I could see movie 1 ending with the first meeting with Gollum (i.e. on the cliffhanger of first appearance whispering "my precious" and such), and the battle versus the dragon makes an obvious finishing point, but I'm lost on the last unless the Dragon battle is the second movie big moment and the third movie one is tying the rise of Sauron back to Fellowship.

MythDragon: spentmiles: Do the hobbits fark in this one? The answer will dictate my level of interest.

They do, in fact. Every time you purchase a ticket, a hobbit will hop out of a little door, and fark you in the ass, whilst giving you a reach around. (The reach around is only so he can grab your ticket money, not to pleasure you)

I thought the reacharound was only available in the 3-D version?

tlchwi02: I really don't understand this. The appeal of the Hobbit as compared to LOTR was that it was a relatively tight narrative that focused on a very simple hero's journey. I think that some of the stuff they are talking about (fighting the necromancer, showing the larger world as it links into LOTR) would be cool to see, but with 3 movies i can't imagine they will be able to effectively maintain the necessary focus on the hobbits journey. And having seen jackson's love of the "nope, thats not the end either!" style of filming, it has me a bit worried

Yes, it's a tight narrative. It's a Pinball Protagonist, where the main character does NOT drive events. Weird things happen to him and he observes they're weird and reacts. Arthur Dent, Idiocracy's Joe "Not Sure" Bauers, etc.

Typically the Pinball Protagonist is a humble, ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.

If you're going to expand the story, you can't do much with building on the character, because the story is about the happenings around him. However, you CAN add more happenings around him. If you're adding on more material after the original "ending", you've got a difficult problem because the unremarkable nature of the person makes it implausible that he'll go on to do more remarkable things once the plotline resolves. However, Bilbo still had that ring, and Arthur Dent still had connections to fantastic people in space and across time.

Khellendros: The Hobbit is being made in three movies: "WTF is up with this money grab? This is sounding like 3 hours of 'Hobbit', six hours of 'The Silmarillion'. Either that, or he's making up shiat out of whole cloth. I'm not sure I'm down with this anymore."

Just following the current trend in movies. If you have a story that doesn't completely suck (a rarity in movies) you best divide it into as many movies as possible. Dividing one movie into just two is so yesterday, I fully expect the next Hunger Games/Glitter Vampire movie installments to be divided into... 4 parts... until someone ups the ante again.

Loadmaster: "Toes. I love hairy toes," she said.

[g-ecx.images-amazon.com image 300x300]

Best. Book. Evar.

\found in in my parents' book collection when I was in 5th grade.
\\looking forward to the film adaption, starring Will Ferrell as Goodgulf and Micky Rooney as Dildo

MuonNeutrino: " How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy?"

Because THE HOBBIT is fun and moves along well and THE TWO TOWERS is where people learn to hate reading?

There is some speculation that Tolkien considered adding an encounter with the Mewlips to the Mirkwood part of the adventure. I wonder if Peter Jackson would have the rights to that.

ringersol: MuonNeutrino: " How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy?"

Because THE HOBBIT is fun and moves along well and THE TWO TOWERS is where people learn to hate reading?

THIS

The Hobbit is fun and is a breezy well-written chatty British children's book, like the Harry Potter of the 1930s.

Reading the Lord of the Rings is like reading the bible.

czei: Not only will I see each of the three films in the theatre, but I'll buy the DVDs when they come out, and them buy them again when the extended director's cut is released.

Hell, I just bought all three of the LOTR movies for a 3rd time when they came out in HD. It beats paying to watch the same damn comic book-based movie remade every few years with different actors.

This for me as well. Though I am betting they release the EE's on BluRay at the same time as the normal EE's.

Here's my money - TAKE ITTT!

Two movie would have sufficed.

Bilbo meets dwarves.
They go out on some gay-ass adventure for no definable reason.
Trolls try to each them; outwitted by sun.
They meet people who are also bears or some shiat.
Bilbo meets Gollum and steals his ring.
They escape scary forest with asshole elves.


You did pretty well up until that point...

Bilbo gets caught by the dragon and unwittingly reveals who help him
Epic fight with dragon because Bilbo screwed up.
Epic Battle of the 5 armies.
The end.


You're leaving out that Gandolf simply appeared out of no where and pretty much tricked Bilbo into going on the adventure. And, actually, there was a point. They were going to reclaim the lead dwarf's treasure from the dragon.



In any case, there is only one reason to make this into 3 movies. Money.

Like was mentioned before, there was no reason to make Deathly Hallows into two movies. There was no reason to make the last Twilight into 2 movies.

Hollywood is getting ridiculous with this crap.

Tax Boy: ringersol: MuonNeutrino: " How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy?"

Because THE HOBBIT is fun and moves along well and THE TWO TOWERS is where people learn to hate reading?

THIS

The Hobbit is fun and is a breezy well-written chatty British children's book, like the Harry Potter of the 1930s.

Reading the Lord of the Rings is like reading the bible.

The Silmarillion is like reading the bible. Actually its go a much more convincing creation myth, if you ask me.

When I first heard that The Hobbit would be expanded into a trilogy, I was really worried. I thought that meant Jackson would just be pulling stuff out of his ass to stretch it into three movies. Then I read about how he'd be pulling in the story of the Necromancer and some of the extra history from the appendices and I felt a little better. I mean hey, wouldn't it be great to see all that stuff on film? One of my favorite parts of the Tolkien experience was going through those appendices as a kid and finding all the little gems and stories about my favorite characters. It showed how multifaceted the story was, and added to the "Epic-ness" of the whole tale.

But then I realized, that this same line of thinking is what got the Aragorn-Arwen love story shoved into the LOTR trilogy. Those were, by far, the most annoying and unnecessary scenes in all the films. It broke up the flow of the story awkwardly, and it was boring. Pages and pages of good material from the book got left out so that Liv Tyler could have more screen time standing around looking forlorn. It was one of the most frustrating parts of the trilogy for me.

See, that's the thing. I trust Tolkien's abilities and discernment as a storywriter more than Jackson's. Tolkien left that stuff in the appendices and not in the story for a reason. And maybe, just maybe, that reason was because he realized it would break up the storyline, detract from character development, and draw the story out into a incomprehensible mess. But Jackson's just a happy fanboy at heart who is thinking about two things: #1) dollar signs and #2)Wooo more battles and magic and cool stuff!

So I don't know. I will probably watch and enjoy the movies, just as I have watched the LOTR repeatedly and hold it in high regard. But I still don't think that Jackson, for all his love and adoration of Tolkien, really gets Tolkien. My first clue was when Aragorn said "Let's go hunt some Orc" in the first movie. The last nail in the coffin was the 1 hour of "Goodbyes" at the end of the last movie which would have been ample time for the scourging of the Shire if he'd cut out some of the other unnecessary stuff from that movie.

I just don't think he quite gets it.

CrotchBeard: [i13.photobucket.com image 487x344]

Why are they out of order?

But i am still waiting for Spaceballs 2 the search for more money

Paging Mr. Brooks

Tax Boy: ringersol: MuonNeutrino: " How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy?"

Because THE HOBBIT is fun and moves along well and THE TWO TOWERS is where people learn to hate reading?

THIS

The Hobbit is fun and is a breezy well-written chatty British children's book, like the Harry Potter of the 1930s.

Reading the Lord of the Rings is like reading the bible.

Heh. To each his own, I guess, but I'd take LotR *or* The Hobbit over Harry Potter (which aren't *bad* but definitely aren't as interesting, in my opinion). The only reason it'd take me longer to read a given word count in LotR instead of in The Hobbit would be that I'm continually getting choked up or being tempted to reread things/read them out loud in appreciation of the sheer *poetry* of Tolkien's writing.

Having read The Hobbit "graphic novel" as a child, and therefore an expert, I can tell you that 3 movies is too long. Maybe one film will focus on a family of giant eagles hunting for food.

MuonNeutrino: Tax Boy: ringersol: MuonNeutrino: " How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy?"

Because THE HOBBIT is fun and moves along well and THE TWO TOWERS is where people learn to hate reading?

THIS

The Hobbit is fun and is a breezy well-written chatty British children's book, like the Harry Potter of the 1930s.

Reading the Lord of the Rings is like reading the bible.

Heh. To each his own, I guess, but I'd take LotR *or* The Hobbit over Harry Potter (which aren't *bad* but definitely aren't as interesting, in my opinion). The only reason it'd take me longer to read a given word count in LotR instead of in The Hobbit would be that I'm continually getting choked up or being tempted to reread things/read them out loud in appreciation of the sheer *poetry* of Tolkien's writing.

I *see* what you are *saying*

My take on this:

The Lord of the Rings trilogy was pretty good. Jackson had to pare each movie down to ~ three hours, and there was a lot left out of each for continuity and available time. If you hadn't read the books, you would not know it, but any LOTR geek can easily list a number of things from each book that didn't make it into the movies. Face it, each movie could have easily been 5 hours without paring down the story line.

The Hobbit is obviously a much shorter read, however a lot goes on. If Jacksom goes into detail in the right places, such as the escape from the elves and breaking into Smaugs cave, as well as the battle, I can see how it could be done in three movies instead of one long one.

Instead of leaving things out for time sake, he has the luxury of going into detail and giving us a movie that was not as condensed.

That is my hope anyway. My fear is that it's just an f'd up way to make more money, seeing how well the LOTR trilogy did

Gunny Highway: MuonNeutrino: Tax Boy: ringersol: MuonNeutrino: " How do you get through the ~300 page hobbit in a weekend but still take a month to finish the ~1500 page trilogy?"

Because THE HOBBIT is fun and moves along well and THE TWO TOWERS is where people learn to hate reading?

THIS

The Hobbit is fun and is a breezy well-written chatty British children's book, like the Harry Potter of the 1930s.

Reading the Lord of the Rings is like reading the bible.

Heh. To each his own, I guess, but I'd take LotR *or* The Hobbit over Harry Potter (which aren't *bad* but definitely aren't as interesting, in my opinion). The only reason it'd take me longer to read a given word count in LotR instead of in The Hobbit would be that I'm continually getting choked up or being tempted to reread things/read them out loud in appreciation of the sheer *poetry* of Tolkien's writing.

I *see* what you are *saying*

*snerk* Ok, I'll give you that one, I probably do use that particular bit of textual emphasis a little too often.

MuonNeutrino: *snerk* Ok, I'll give you that one, I probably do use that particular bit of textual emphasis a little too often.

Haha. Just messing around. Your post was pretty spot on.

Swear to god... if Jackson makes another Tolkeen into a movie we're gonna have to buy full price tickets just to see the trailer...

jesus...

ITS A TINY BOOK GODDAMNIT

alwaysjaded: I really struggled reading that one.

As a voracious reader, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, I have never been able to finish the LOTR series. From a writer's standpoint, I can appreciate the amount of thought he put into what amounts to background material, but that's exactly where it should have stayed ... in the background, for him to draw upon while writing his story.

I'm making another attempt, mostly because I'm bored after finishing The Song of Fire and Ice series and hoping that slogging through the fourth and fifth books of THAT series will have prepped my soul for pages and pages of irrelevant information of hobbit society.

I hope there's some breath taking scenery. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some long, panning shots.

When I saw that this was going to be three movies, I threw my two liter of Mountain Dew across the cubical farm. This work requires at least six movies, if not eight, to truly capture the spirit of the book. Three movies will barely get you to the Misty Mountains.

I'm sure I'll watch each movie at the theater for 48 hours a piece until I can say every line in unison, but I still won't be satisfied.