When Peter Jackson announced that The Hobbit would become a trilogy I was extremely excited! I was hoping that would happen, there's enough awesome material and background story in Middle Earth to turn that wonderful story into a film trilogy. I just figured everyone was excited about it! I guess I was wrong, there's apparently a lot of people who aren't on board with the idea. Why? Because they just don't have the vision of the full Tolkien universe. In a recent interview with THR Jackson defended his vision of the story and how he plans on making it happen.
The book is written in a very brisk pace, so pretty major events in the story are covered in only two or three pages. So once you start to develop the scenes and plus you wanted to do a little bit more character development, plus the fact that we could also adapt the appendices of Return of the King, which is 100-odd pages of material that sort of takes place around the time of The Hobbit, so we wanted to expand the story of The Hobbit a little bit more, as did Tolkien himself. So all those factors combined gave us the material to do it.
Now that really can't be that hard to grasp can it? Not sure how anyone can't get behind that simple logic. But in case you're one of the doubters, Sir Ian McKellen added his two cents to the conversation saying,
Anyone who thinks Peter Jackson would fall for market forces around him rather than artistic integrity doesn't know the guy or the body of his work. If we just made one movie, The Hobbit, the fact is that all the fans, the eight-, nine- and 10-year-old boys, they would watch it 1000 times. Now, they've got three films they can watch 1,000 times.
It's so true. Then there's Richard Armitage who plays Thorin in the movie explaining that three films allow the story to breathe and characters to develop more,
It does warrant three films. These films are underlaid and textured and layered with incredible detail. And the dwarf characters for example, in Tolkien's book they're very thinly sketched, actually a bit of an amorphous group, whereas every single dwarf you will get to know throughout the course of this journey. They are all very developed parts. You will care for and get to know them, and see how they function in the world. And I love that also, because these films, The Hobbit isn't a separate universe. It's entirely as you saw in the first films, the broader themes are built into the texture of it, and this allows each character to have their moments and play their parts in those themes, that's certainly three films. Condensing it into two films seems almost impossible.
Amen. So seriously, what's the problem with turning The Hobbit into three movies? There isn't one.