Three Hobbit Films Confirmed by Peter Jackson

[sauronsfinger]

...one of my hobbies is building detailed and intricate diorama's of the scenes.

And mighty fine they are too! I hope to see that Helm's Deep of yours finished one of these days!

ETA: This article about The Bridge Direct who have been awarded the worldwide master toy and game licensing rights for The Hobbit may be of interest, SF:

...the head of The Bridge Direct, Inc. is Jay Foreman. Jay Foreman was formerly the President of Play Along Toys, the same company that created the Armies of Middle Earth figures.

Could be worth contacting TBD and askng them directly...

Much thanks for that info Elentári. I will contact that person and ask.

As for Helms Deep...... it sits in many storage boxes.... the wall... the keep... the bridge... the tower .... and over 600 figures. My grandson is going to be 11 soon and I hope he can build it with me when I leave my legislative job in a year or two.

It will have to be at least seven feet by ten feet and I will need a railroad model type table top with holes in places to do the work. At may age I am too old to be crawling among trestles without knocking them down.

We will see.

[Elentári]

Sounds awesome! and I know being able to work on the project with a loved one will be precious to you, so I hope it comes to pass.

[Alatar]

Along with 16 new stills from The Hobbit, there is a new scroll released by WB, showing the likely new ending for Film 1!!!

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/theh ... scroll.jpg

From TORn

Warner Bros. has also opened the floodgates of new images and smacked viewers in the head with the ending of the first film, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

It duplicates the promotional scroll released right before Comic-Con when there where still two films. That confirmed the original break and this one, the new ending of the first film...

I have to admit this worries me. Since Gandalf doesn't leave till Mirkwood, that means there's no opportunity for any White Council material in this movie. That means we're looking for them to pad out 6 chapters of The Hobbit into a 2-3 Hour movie. I really can't see it.

We have The Unexpected Party, The Trolls, Rivendell and maybe some White Council, The Mountain Pass, The Goblin King, Riddles in the Dark and Out of the Frying Pan.

Even with a bunch of backstory, that's not a 2 hour movie. I seriously doubt that PJ is going to release a 90 minute movie, so where does the rest of the story come from? Even a montage of Erebor at its best won't take more than 5 minutes. Somebody suggested that the Barrow Downs may be transplanted, with the Barrow Wights being replaced by the tombs of the Nazgûl. It sounds like a stretch to me, but I guess Gandalf will need to get those blades that he shows to the White Council from somewhere. It just feels like this is creating more problems than it solves.

[kzer_za]

Gandalf leaves both before the Trollshaws and after Rivendell, doesn't he? They can also work White Council material into the Rivendell visit.

[Alatar]

Yes. One would assume he picks up the Wiki blade while "looking ahead" when Bilbo is burgling some Trolls.

[axordil]

I always assumed there would be some use of the dwarves' passage through Rivendell to get the WC plot rolling. It strikes me as a good time to flashback to Gandalf's acquisition of the map and key from Thrain, for one thing, which we may have seen glimpses of in the trailer.

[Elentári]

We also know, from Quint's set reports, that Gandalf bumps into Radagast somewhere around the time he is "looking ahead" on the way to the Trollshaws...

[Dave_LF]

I actually think it would make good sense to show that scene later in flashback and keep film 1 focused tightly on Bilbo. But if they need it there to fill up time, so be it.

[Elentári]

I've seen plenty of suggestions for the content of AUJ on TORn, so let's put one together here:


- Prologue (old Bilbo & Frodo just before Bilbo's 111th b-day party)
- Bilbo and Gandalf's meeting
- scenes of Bilbo at Hobbiton market, possibly intro of Sackville-Bagginses?
- The Unexpected Party & intro of dwarves
- Flashback to Gandalf discovering Thrain & getting key/map?
- Flashback of coming of Smaug to Erebor (we've seen the song in the trailer so it's likely they'll have a flashback of some sort here)
- Next morning - Gandalf gets Bilbo off on his Unexpected Journey
- Bilbo catches up with Dwarves at the Green Dragon

- The Trollshaws scene
- Gandalf and Radagast meeting up to discuss suspicious goings on
- possible sequence on Ettenmoors regarding discovery of Morgul blade/Nazgûl tombs? (or maybe this will be another flashback, as part of W/C at Rivendell...)
- The trek from the Trollshaws to Rivendell
- Rivendell with dwarves and Elrond and map
- White Council

- The trek from Rivendell to the Misties
- The stone giants in the rain
- Capture by goblins
- Goblin Town scene
- Gandalf's reappearance and the death of the Great Goblin
- Riddles in the Dark
- Gandalf and the dwarves escape the tunnels
- Bilbo escapes through the back door
- Bilbo meets back up with the company, impresses dwarves (particularly Balin) with his expert sneaking
- Scenes of the goblins gearing up to avenge the Great Goblin
- Warg and goblin attack, and fiery trees
- Eagle rescue

I would like to see AUJ continue up to the eagles leaving the Company at the Carrock at least, rather than a cliff-hanger rescue ending, so that would mean two more scenes:

- The Eyrie
- The Carrock

Also to be considered are possible scenes set at Dol Guldur involving Bolg (or possibly the "undead" Azog)

Anything else I might have missed? All in all, there does seem a fair bit to fill out AUJ...

[Alatar]

I still see that as about 6 events, which is very little for a 2 hour movie. I mean essentially its The Unexpected Party, The Trolls, Rivendell, Goblin King, Gollum, Wargs. I mean, yes there will be padding, and some backstory and foreshadowing, but overall its pretty thin.

Compare to Fellowship:
Prologue
Party
Shire to Bree - Nazgûl
Aragorn
Weathertop attack
Flight to the Ford
Council of Elrond
Fellowship heads to Caradhras
Mines of Moria, including Watcher in the Water and Balrog
Lothlórien
The Great River
Breaking of the Fellowship

Now thats about as broad strokes as I used on the Hobbit, ignoring all the little bits and pieces that could be called scenes in their own right, just the major plot points.

Its about double what the Hobbit has?

[Elentári]

If we count Watcher and Moria/Balrog as 2, then your FotR list above has 13 "events"

Your original listing for AUJ:

We have The Unexpected Party, The Trolls, Rivendell and maybe some White Council, The Mountain Pass, The Goblin King, Riddles in the Dark and Out of the Frying Pan.

has 8, not including the Prologue which we know we are going to get, nor the Eagles, if we get to their Eyries. Throw in Angmar tombs/morgul blade as it doesn't appear to be a flashback from what we've heard of the ComicCon footage, then that gives us 11 - not so far off...

I fully expect the Shire scenes to be played out in depth, and even expanded - perhaps a good 30 mins before we actually leave Hobbiton? We know we are getting around 15 mins for the whole Riddles sequence, according to Andy Serkis, if it is not cut for the EE, plus of course, the extended stay at Rivendell to accommodate the White Council meeting.

Basically I pretty much expect to see everything take longer than it does in the book!

[Alatar]

Yes, but that was padding out. My second list was trying to create a closer equivalent to what I think of as major plot points. It was a deliberate attempt to correlate where my first list wasn't. I think the number of "beats" in Fellowship was about double that of the proposed Hobbit Movie 1

Well, I suppose we shall see in a few months. I, for one, am much less excited now.


I hope I'm proved wrong. I really do.

[halplm]

There is not enough in The Hobbit for 2 movies, let alone 3... there is going to be so much filler, so many slow scenes... And the movies are going to be LONG because that's all PJ knows how to do.

Thinking about how much he made up out of thin air when LOTR (a book at least 5 times as long as The Hobbit) when it was only 3 films... I am frightened of what we will see in these movies.

Even assuming all the Gandalf/White council stuff takes up as much as the actual narrative, that's still less than half the length of LOTR.

So, we have to assume the narrative from the book will be at MOST 1/5 of the story of these films... given PJ's history, I'm guessing more like 1/8... plus a little bit from other Tolkien sources... so say 1/6 of these three movies will loosely be based on Tolkien's The Hobbit...

5/6 of 3 long films made up completely by PJ... I don't even know what to call that... but it's not Tolkien.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm really excited that they have more time to develop things. I would be shocked if any of the films are less than 2 and half hours, minimum.

[Primula Baggins]

The one thing that seriously worries me about three films is the long "dead" stretch of completely extraneous "adventure" in the middle of PJ's King Kong.

I saw the movie only once, but as I recall it, the whole bit (involving them falling to the bottom of a chasm and fighting horrible bugs and running, running, running endlessly from dinosaurs) could have been snipped out and replaced by someone going "Whew, that was close!" And the movie would have been much better, to my mind. The good parts (and they were good) would have had much more impact without that pointless, exhausting detour.

Of course, that was PJ embroidering without source material. Here at least there is plenty of real Tolkien text on which the additions can and should be based. I'm not without hope, not at all. But I can also understand hal's concerns.

[axordil]

The bug sequence actually was scripted for the original, but cut before production because it "stopped the story." They knew about pacing in 1933...

[halplm]

Ah but PJ knows better...

[WampusCat]

The list totally overlooked the belching and dwarf-tossing scenes. There's the missing length right there!

[halplm]

[axordil]

I thought this time they combined the dwarf tossing and belching into a biathlon-style event.