Peter Jackson Could Turn The Hobbit Into A Trilogy?

By Matt Holmes / July 15, 2012

Peter Jackson completed filming on his two-part The Hobbit films earlier this month and is now locked away in his post-production suite putting the final touches on his epic return to Middle Earth. In what I imagine will be a rare appearance outside of the editing bay between now and November's premiere for the first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the New Zealand born director appeared in front of fans yesterday at Comic Con and had some rather eye-opening things to say. Over the past few weeks there have been some small rumblings that Warner Bros, who let's not forget just lost their Harry Potter cash-cow last year and are about to get one big final payday from Chris Nolan's Batman saga and are in need of new money making alternatives, were talking to Jackson about the possibility of shortening the length of The Hobbit movies to try and get three separate features out of them. Obviously if it is feasible, it could turn out to be a highly profitable move for Warner Bros. Three movies = three trips to the cinema = three times the revenue, in theory. You just need to look at the splitting of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay into two separate parts to see this has become a smart business model in Hollywood. Warner Bros, who should be credited with doing it first on Potter, basically earned themselves an extra billion dollars by doing Potter as two movies and likely much more from the extra home video release. Addressing the rumour yesterday regarding The Hobbit becoming three movies, Jackson played down the talks of "The Hobbit" trilogy but did seem to hint that he wasn't quite done with Middle-Earth just yet...

"We also have the rights to use this 125 pages of additional notes where Tolkien expanded the world of €˜The Hobbit€™€Fran and I have been talking to the studio about other things we haven€™t been able to shoot and seeing if we persuade them to do a few more weeks of shooting, probably more than a few weeks actually, next year. And what form that would actually end up taking, well the discussions are pretty early€" he said, adding: €œThere€™s other parts of the story that we€™d like to tell that we haven€™t been able to tell yet.€

If Jackson tells Warner Bros he can film enough footage in those few weeks of filming to expand The Hobbit into three movies, I reckon they would give him the few extra million and snap his hands off. Quite amazing how far Peter Jackson has come when not so long ago it looked like a last minute strike would block Jackson from realising his ten year dream over ever getting these movies made. More likely of course is the extra footage would turn out to be used for extended editions of The Hobbit films on Blu-ray and DVD, just as what happened to The Lord of the Rings films, which further fleshed out the stories and the characters that didn't make it into the theatrical cut. Jackson himself confirmed yesterday during the Hall H presentation for The Hobbit that extended editions were likely in the future and that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey theatrical cut is expected to run at least 2 and a half hours long, but probably closer to three hours. Jackson unveiled twelve minutes of footage from the film at Comic Con yesterday (in 2D and not 24 fps!) which seemed to go down much better than the previous footage demonstration and as always we are eager to see the footage for ourselves and are praying, no matter how unlikely, that Warner Bros might release it online.