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?

• The Hobbit is shorter than any of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Stretching it into two films already seemed like it would require a lot of filler; three just seems like madness.
• Given that the book was aimed largely at children, one might have hoped that the movie would be good for kids, too. But a three-part series already makes that implausible, and almost every bit of new material I can imagine adding to the main story would make it more mature in tone.
• Harry Potter worked as a series of films because it was seven self-contained stories. The Lord of the Rings held up as three films because it was truly epic in scale. But The Hobbit is (for the most part) a simple adventure story, much of it just a series of loosely connected episodes with just one major plot arc from beginning to end. Yes, it has an epic backdrop, but that's not central enough to the main story to sustain an epic-scale film trilogy.
• One of the stories that Jackson fears "would remain untold" without a third film is "the Battle of Dol Guldur". Mr. Jackson, if I don't know how the White Council "attacked" Sauron to drive him out of Mirkwood, I'm pretty sure that you don't, either. Apparently you think it was a battle. Why am I not surprised?

• Copyright law puts Jackson in a bit of a Catch 22 here. He has the rights to make a movie based on The Hobbit and LotR (including its appendices). He emphatically does not have the rights to use material from Tolkien's other books such as The Silmarillion or (most notably) Unfinished Tales. (Nor will he: the Tolkien Estate is rich enough that its priority is protecting Tolkien's legacy, not making more money. And Christopher Tolkien abhors the way that Jackson warped the essential themes of LotR.)

  That's a problem. If I wanted to expand upon the story told in The Hobbit, the first place to look is absolutely "The Quest of Erebor", a section of Unfinished Tales containing a scene that Tolkien removed from the concluding chapters of LotR shortly before its publication. In it, Gandalf explains much of the backstory to The Hobbit: why he was involved at all, what his interactions with Thorin were like when Bilbo wasn't there, and all sorts of other details that would be impossible to guess specifically from the appendices to LotR. (Would you have guessed that Gandalf's reason for helping Thorin was to prevent Sauron from using Smaug in the coming war, perhaps to destroy Rivendell and the rest of the north? That was a surprise to me!) Other sections of the book are relevant, too, as are bits from other books.

  Jackson can't use any of that material without opening himself to a lawsuit that would have a good chance of blocking release of the films entirely. But if he invents his own clearly-different replacements, he's deliberately changing Tolkien's story. Of course, he's done that before with less justification, but for the previous films he still claimed repeatedly that he was doing all he could to bring Tolkien's vision to life. This time, making that claim could get him into deep trouble.

  The easiest way to avoid those issues would be to make The Hobbit into just one film, or maybe two, and simply not address them in substantially more depth than the original book did. But these are essential topics for tying the new story together with the old one, and it would be hard enough to avoid delving into them in two films. In three, it seems all but impossible.

EDIT: I just saw a wonderfully concise statement of the issue elsewhere online: "Bilbo's reaction to the announcement of a 3rd movie was actually already quoted in The Lord of the Rings: 'I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.'"

Comments

[silentmonster.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. That does sound difficult. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and hope they will be good. I read The Hobbit so so long ago, I really don't remember much about it.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[feuervogel]

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

[beth_leonard]

*nod*

--Beth

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

*insert standard rant about copyright here*

[steuard.livejournal.com]

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.

I'm not sure where exactly I stand these days, but I've begun to think that it doesn't matter: that my generation (and the ones before) have already lost our opportunity to have a say in what comes next. By doing absolutely nothing to address the issue (and by allowing major corporations to actively fight any change), we've left the next generation down to invent their own copyright ethics from scratch and allowed those ethics to become firmly entrenched in their culture. Unsurprisingly, the ethics developed by a bunch of teenagers is awfully shortsighted in many ways and I'm not especially happy with their new reality, but at least its glaring flaws are different than the glaring flaws of our present system.

So perhaps we're entering a future where absolutely everything is essentially CC-BY and artists will only make a living via tools like Kickstarter, Unglue.it, and PayPal donation buttons. I have no idea how it's going to work out. But as I said, I'm not sure that I get to have any input at this point, either.

Oh, and one of the best discussions of all this that I've seen anywhere was Jonathan Coulton's essay a while back. Good points there.