A 3rd Hobbit movie: Bad Idea

[steuard]

Peter Jackson confirmed today that he will make The Hobbit into three movies, rather than two as formerly planned. To my eye, this is a spectacularly bad idea. Why, you ask?

Comments

[donaithnen]

And add on top of that they've already finished principal photography. I know they filmed more than they needed, but unless he actually had a third script hidden under his hat the whole time and was surreptitiously filming exactly the scenes he knew he was going to need it's hard to imagine how this is going to be handled elegantly.

[steuard]

Yeah: another concern is that by stretching this into three movies, he'll wind up using a bunch of footage that would otherwise have been consigned to the "meh, not worth including" pile. (Though I have heard comments that the plan would require additional filming in the coming year.)

[steuard]

What the heck is up with this cat photo? Every single comment I post gets the friggin' cat photo! (Not that it's at all bad, but sometimes it's inappropriate.) Even though I very explicitly see my usual default userpic next to the comment. Here: I'll try choosing my Tolkien userpic explicitly for this one. Maybe that will work.

[akiko]

Thank you for putting my vague "eew wtf no" into sensical words.

[beth_leonard]

*nod*

--Beth

[zathrus]

I haven't been following this at all; I'd heard there was going to be a Hobbit movie, and assumed it would be one movie containing approximately the story told in The Hobbit. Two sounds a little weird; three does sound rather concerning, and considerably less like something I could take my kids to (or at least, less like something I could take all/most of them to).

Newt

[kuddliphish]

I've also been thinking about taking my kid to the Hobbit movie, and assumed it would be stand along like the book. Now I'm considerably less interested.

[ukelele]

*insert standard rant about copyright here*

[steuard]

I used to have long, long discussions about copyright on the Tolkien Usenet newsgroups back in the day. My position at the time was that our existing copyright laws absolutely need to be reformed, both to address the new realities of the internet and to undo the ceaseless erosion of the public domain by Disney and others over the past century. But, I argued, it was essential for the sake of artists that we continue to obey the existing laws until a good replacement was enacted