It seems that Peter Jackson has finally decided to continue with the series. He has signed on to make a 2 movie prequel to the Lord of the Rings. It should be out by 2010.

Story here!!!

I can't wait!!!

That's awesizzle!

We just happened to finish to finish reading "The Hobbit" in class. My classmates will be so 'excited' by the news.

Well, huzzah!

Took him long enough. I'm glad he's finally decided to go for it.

We likes his movies, preciousssss.

It won't be as epic.

Hopefully they won't leave out the parts where bad things happen to good people. I love those parts.

How are they planning on splitting it into two? Then you'd have to like, cut it off right after they leave the misty mountains!

The split would probably come a little later. The back half has a lot more in it.

What do you consider front half and back half? I consider the middle to be right after they all meet up after misty mountains.

It'll probably be a cliffhanger type after they get ambushed by the spiders in the forest.

I think they are going to include the White Council's (Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, Galadriel, Elrond and others) attack on Dol Gulder, which is where Gandalf was for the second half of the book. That would certainly add two epic battle scenes... I suspect that possibly Dol Gulder will end the first, and Five Arrmies the second.

And if there is any epic-ness to it, it'll be the epic failure.

Agreed, if it wasn't for those parts we would have a rather boring movie on our hands.

Do they know who is playing the younger Bilbo Baggins? Or are they just gonna use Ian again?

Not a clue, its just been announced though Jackson said he wanted to do it when Return of the King released all those years ago.

I guess we'll have to wait and see. Curses. I hate waiting.

Ian Holm would be way to old though.

Finally...hopefully it won't feel forced. Anybody else like the old Hobbit movie?

I seem to remember some rather short cartoon version from quite a while back...

there was a cartoon made in the 70s, it was good though they also made a cartoon of the first half of LOTR that sucked hard.

Bingo...and stay away from that damn LOTR movie. Scary-Bad

They left it out of Return of the King.

I wanted to see Saruman scour the Shire, damnit!

Once again I agree with Verbose. I think there is something wrong going on.

I will never forgive him for that NEVER! and seriously how do you split the hobbit into two? I just smell money grabbing tactics! Unless he does it well at which point I will forgive him.

He's not really done a truly bad film yet, maybe this is the first.
You could basically have cut the last 1/2 hour of Return of the king and had a better film but that was his desicion.

I just hope its good fun , who knows maybe a silmarillion film is upcoming *has difficulty keeping a straight face*

You're going through the Change.

Before long, you'll be espousing similar views to me to your loved ones and detractors.

Fight it hunter. Run, run while you still have time

I have a feeling Children of Hurin will be next after this. We all know it wont stop until they have destroyed every little scrap of notes J.R.R Tolkin wrote.

I remember I saw that...


I don't remember reading about that....

"destroyed"? The man wasn't a shakespeare, he wasn't that good a writer he was just good a telling a story, his characters are dull and lifeless and the constant use of people who are son's of someone gets on my wick. He could write a good story but it amazed me when people said "Legolas and gimli are nothing like in the books" of course they weren't, in the books they were scenery that killed orcs!

Your right, I didn't quite get my point across, what i mean was more, he wrote something else lets use it as a cash cow because he wrote LOTR and the Hobbit.

Ahhhhh, sorry my fault didn't realise what you meant .

I would agree there, but at least with Peter Jackson involved it will probably be a GOOD cash cow

You stopped reading after they destroyed the ring, didn't you?

Everyone stops reading after they destroy the ring. There is a reason to a whole extra half a book in the back there, you know.


Hey, be fair. Every ten chapters or so they'd get a line of dialogue.

Yeah, it irks me when tolkein fanatics start frothing at the mouth when one word of their precious book is changed.

I stand by my claim that there are only two Fantasy book series that are unblemished.

Those are?

George R. R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, never before have I been able to relate to more than one character (and at least one of them is only a bad guy sometimes) or been as annoyed by a realistic character who just happens to be annoying. Truly, a marvel, with sparing use of the fantastic and a focus on the characters. It's politics done right.

Steven Erikson's Malazan Books Of The Fallen, an epic masterpiece of in medias res. You have no clue and don't much care at the beginning and you're certain and in love by the end.

I have the first four books of A Song of Ice and Fire in my bookcase, I've been meaning to read them, but I just never get around to it. This probably gave me the reason I needed to do it! Woo! New book series!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming:

I don't even remember them destroying the ring, everything after Shelog is kind-of a blur for some reason unbeknown to me. I remember finishing the book, though. It's odd. I also remember nothing past the spider ambush from The Hobbit. I might have blocked it out, that was back when I was pretty young, and my reading speed hadn't gone through the roof. Perhaps the pain of separation from such a companion lead me to erase the endings to avoid the truth that it really was finished.

Or I just forgot like I forget everything else. Yeah, we'll go with that.

That would be terrible, Sil is basically the MiddleEarth Bible doing up short films would be better than a whole movie of it.

There's be more Sil movies than Freddy Kreuger movies if they ever did make 'em.

I am NOT going to go see the "Pick up dozen egg's," movie.

I also have to agree that the Silmarillion would not be a good idea for a movie...just too much, with far too much area in which to play with the story and screw something up.

And if there is a Sil movie, can we skip the "In the beginning there was air. Sentient Air, that played songs. But some Bad Air played the wrong chord and screwed everyone?"

Keep an eye on Petyr Baelish, especially towards the end.

I love him so very much.

Thats why I say make shorts, though all the stories are connected some are leaps and bounds away from eachother. Different artists could do different stories, which would be cool. If they ever went into the Unfinished Tales and History of Middle Earth books they could do the same but for the different versions of the poems they could just pick one definate one instead of trying to mix them up.

I say steer clear of the poetry.

That's not visual material.

The stories are free verse poems though...

I wish I stopped reading immediately after Frodo arrived at Rivendell. The only thing that made me read the whole thing was that I paid some eight bucks for the set (a ton of money to a 12-year-old Russian kid back in 1999).

Before, when a friend asked me whether I had read LotR, I said, "Yes I totally loved it", and he lent me Dragonlance Saga. If I hadn't, he would've probably lent me LotR itself, and I'd have never touched another fantasy book. LotR is a true fantasy classic, because it somehow manages to make fantasy, a genre of purely entertainment purposes, as boring as every mandatory school reading (with the notable exception of Lermontov's "The Contemporary Hero" - that's a good one). Fantasy is not about bashing orcs, it is about changing the world. lack of world-changing events is a common drawback of all shared realities, but books are *supposed* to be better. (Also, you can fly a Deathstar through the LotR plotholes.)

Hobbit starts out as a fairytale, but ends with the funeral chords of "classic fantasy". Deux ex machina plot twists should be treated as 100kV plasma devices: the writer should get a license to use one, renewed yearly.


There are masters of animation who make it (poetry, not silmarillion) visual material. Hey, my sister is an artist who draws some great pics occasionally (not always, and never on a given theme). Too bad she doesn't know anything about moviemaking.

Btw, Dragons of Autumn Twilight will be released on Jan 15 on DVD. Now that's good news!

...

And Dragonlance is better? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the books when I was grym's age and there are still aspects of them I enjoy (the Twins books were much better) but great literature with reasoned and explainable solutions to problems it is not.