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.'"