"The Hobbit" Is A Trilogy Now

Forbes put it best on this one, "the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy weighs in at 1,347 pages not including appendixes. The Hobbit is a mere 285 pages long." And now they both have three films dedicated to them.

I have been following "The Hobbit" since pre-production, and I will readily admit to being very excited about the upcoming film. But then it became two films. Now let's be honest here, The Hobbit is a fun, light, and relatively quick read. I know an unabridged audio copy only runs for 8 hours. So stretching it to two separate three hour films was already pushing it. But Peter Jackson has always been  a bit long-winded in his films so I hoped for the best.

Then the unthinkable happened at Comic-Con during the summer. Peter Jackson said this:
"There's so much good stuff in the appendices that we haven't been able to squeeze into these movies."

And that's when I knew there would be a problem.

Ya see, extended edition DVD's of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy are fine - and this also would have worked great for The Hobbit. You aren't forced to watch the extra content. There is a reason information is put in an appendix. It's too jarring to interrupt the narrative to put it in - and the detrimental effects don't outweigh its value to the story. Tolkien saw this when he wrote the stories.
Jackson does not.

If you want to see what happens when Peter Jackson stretches too little material over too long a time, watch King Kong again. The man needs a more forceful editor, someone to trim the fat off his otherwise very fit and handsome bodies of work. And with the current climate in Hollywood and the amount of power Jackson holds nobody is gonna tell him to back it down.

At the end of the day, it comes down to money for the studios. Warner Brothers is banking on this franchise continuing to make big money, and even at three films I see no indication that this would be otherwise. The cost to extend the production to cover the extra material does not outweigh the potential profits. So now you have three films. Period. It's a disturbing trend you should expect more of, just look at Breaking Dawn parts 1 and 2, and the Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End and Dead Man's Chest. 

Regardless, I will still be there opening night crammed in an overfull theater with everyone else. Let's just hope Jackson surprises us with that old magic we've come to expect.