Only two weeks ago at Comic-Con Peter Jackson revealed he was toying with what to do with all the extra footage he has shot for a two film adaptation of The Hobbit. Now you’ve done it Peter Jackson: cue the many rumours that The Hobbit may be extended to a trilogy.
Peter Jackson is reported to have discussed his excitement at Comic-Con about the 125 pages of notes in an appendices that JRR Tolkien wrote and included in the final The Lord of the Rings novel Return of the King. Yep, Peter Jackson has the rights to these appendices and has used them to shoot extra scenes surrounding Middle Earth mythology that wasn’t in The Hobbit.
Here’s the word from the horses mouth, Peter Jackson himself quoted in Deadline New York:
“What people have to realise is we’ve adapted The Hobbit, plus taken this additional 125 pages of notes, that’s what you’d call them. Because Tolkien himself was planning the rewrite The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings, to make it speak to the story of The Lord of the Rings much more.
“In the novel, Gandalf disappears for various patches of time. In 1936, when Tolkien was writing that book, he didn’t have a clue what Gandalf was doing. But later on, when he did The Lord of the Rings and he’d hit on this whole epic story, he was going to go back and revise The Hobbit and he wrote all these notes about how Gandalf disappears and was really investigating the possible return of Sauron, the villain from The Lord of the Rings. Sauron doesn’t appear at all in The Hobbit. Tolkien was retrospectively fitting The Hobbit to embrace that mythology. He never wrote that book, but there are 125 pages of notes published at the back of Return of the King in one of the later editions. It was called The Appendices, and they are essentially his expanded Hobbit notes. So we had the rights to those as well and were allowed to use them.
“We haven’t just adapted The Hobbit; we’ve adapted that book plus great chunks of his appendices and woven it all together. The movie explains where Gandalf goes; the book never does. We’ve explained it using Tolkien’s own notes. That helped inform the tone of the movie, because it allowed us to pull in material he wrote in The Lord of the Rings era and incorporate it with The Hobbit.”
Word on the street is there are “internal discussions” going on about the trilogy idea…. nothing is certain.
Hey, I love LOTR and The Hobbit (and sure; rumours are only rumours) but even this die-hard fan is a little dubious of Bilbo’s ability to pull off three flicks…. thoughts?
