I’m not generally one to hear the latest news about Peter Jackson’s work from my father.  When he told me today that The Hobbit could be three films, I assumed he’d misread something.  Perhaps heard a bad connection on a telephone call mention something about three rabbits appearing in their garden, but not three Hobbit films.
To my eternal shame, it appears he was right. Â Peter Jackson has now stated that the second Hobbit film could become two, making a three-part trilogy.
Cynics may call this a money-making ploy, but to be honest, given Jackson’s affection for the material, that’s never been his style.
Speaking at Comic Com, he said he was in discussions with Warner Bros over extending the second film in his Hobbit series into a, well, “extended edition” or perhaps even two films.
“I’d like to shoot a bunch more good stuff that we can’t shoot. There’s so much good stuff in the appendices that we haven’t been able to squeeze into these movies.”
“We’ve used more source material than The Hobbit. For instance in The Hobbit when Gandalf mysteriously disappears for chapters, it was never really explained where he’s gone.”
“Much later Tolkien filled in those details. In these appendices he did talk about what happened and it was all together a lot darker and more serious than what was written in The Hobbit.”
As we reported earlier this week, principal photography on The Hobbit has wrapped, but if I were them, I wouldn’t tear down the sets just yet.