Empireonline.com has some interesting news about the upcoming movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit:
We’ve known for a while that Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro’s eagerly-awaited adaptation of the Lord Of The Rings prequel, The Hobbit, would comprise two movies, due in December 2011 and 2012. But the make-up of those two movies has been up for debate… until now.
We spoke exclusively to both Del Toro and Jackson for our birthday issue, and they told us the latest, which is…
“We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro.
“We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.”
So there you go. The second film will not, as had previously been suggested, a film that will bridge the 60-year gap between The Hobbit and the start of Fellowship Of The Ring.
We’ve known for a long time now that The Hobbit was going to be split up into two movies (hey, movie companies like money, who knew?), but it’s nice to know that they’re switching focus back to The Hobbit. One has to wonder whether two movies isn’t too much to cover the events in The Hobbit, but when one considers how dense the novel is in action (every chapter is, essentially, a short story with its own arc), I trust that Del Toro and Jackson have the integrity and talent to do it justice.
At least it’s a better alternative to them trying to write an unnecessary sequel about Aragorn trying to hunt down Gollum….
